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Quotes by Essayists - Page 4

That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.
David Foster Wallace Quotes
When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.
Nick Hornby Quotes
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire Quotes
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
H.L. Mencken Quotes
What distances can be explored without God?
Sorin Cerin Quotes
And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
Leslie Jamison Quotes
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire Quotes
When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.
Susan Griffin Quotes
This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before.
Susan Griffin Quotes
The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas Quotes
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books,You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
Walt Whitman Quotes
A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.
Edward Abbey Quotes
the bouquetBetween me and the worldyou are a bay, a sailthe faithful ends of a ropeyou are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry.Between me and the worldyou are a picture frame, a windowa field covered in wildflowersyou are a breath, a bed,a night that keeps the stars company.Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compassa ray of light that slips through the gloomyou are a biographical sketch, a book marka preface that comes at the end.between me and the worldyou are a gauze curtain, a mista lamp shining in my dreamsyou are a bamboo flute, a song without wordsa closed eyelid carved in stone.Between me and the worldyou are a chasm, a poolan abyss plunging downyou are a balustrade, a walla shield’s eternal pattern.
Bei Dao Quotes
My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Anne Fadiman Quotes
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Living things don't all requirelight in the same degree. Some of usmake our own light: a silver leaflike a path no one can use, a shallowlake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.But you know this already.You and the others who thinkyou live for truth and, by extension, loveall that is cold.
Louise Glück Quotes
True affluence is not needing anything.
Gary Snyder Quotes
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully
Anne Carson Quotes
It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.
Flannery O'Connor Quotes
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes
I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.
Susan Griffin Quotes
A word was more valuable to them when they were not sure of its value. Since they became famous, their word has been more expensive but its value is less.
Dejan Stojanovic Quotes
Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?
Sarah Ruhl Quotes
History is written by the victors.
Walter Benjamin Quotes
We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).
Chuck Klosterman Quotes
Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard
Stanisław Lem Quotes
TO BE is life's dilemma while facing the eternity of death.
Sorin Cerin Quotes
Like characters in Greek tragedy, we seem fated to push technology towards its ultimate degree as if we were possessed by malignant gods. We call these gods "curiosity" and "creativity" and "reason" and "progress", but when these words are perverted by technocrats, they are more like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Curtis White Quotes
Forgive me,joy,if I blasphemed youbefore I learned to love.
Milan Rúfus Quotes
Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.
Ortega y Gasset Quotes
Ah if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.
Chuck Klosterman Quotes
The kingdom of heaven in not a place but a state of mind.
John Burroughs Quotes
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
A man is known by the books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.
Flannery O'Connor Quotes
I'm beginning to think that to hope isn't the same as to expect something. To hope is to believe that life is an acceptable chaos.
Goenawan Mohamad Quotes
It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Walter Pater Quotes
Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.
Dejan Stojanovic Quotes
Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.
Charles Simic Quotes
If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.
John Crowley Quotes
Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.
Nick Hornby Quotes
Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
David Rakoff Quotes
I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)
Edward Abbey Quotes
There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.
Dejan Stojanovic Quotes
In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.
Edmund White Quotes
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.
Marilynne Robinson Quotes
it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.
Marilynne Robinson Quotes
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.
Joseph Addison Quotes
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.
Dejan Stojanovic Quotes
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separa
Adrienne Rich Quotes
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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