Quotes by Essayists - Page 7

We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.

H.L. Mencken

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

Edmund White

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

Rachel Cusk

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

William Styron

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

David Foster Wallace

Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...

Virginia Woolf

Absolute equals nothingness.

Dejan Stojanovic

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

Stephen Spender

Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Thomas Carlyle

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

Salman Rushdie

I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.

Virginia Woolf

in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.

Tony Judt

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

David Foster Wallace

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Charles Baudelaire

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

Roland Barthes

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Flannery O'Connor

A man must get a thing before he can forget it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.

Virginia Woolf

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Edward Abbey

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

H.L. Mencken

Memory changes as a person matures.

Siri Hustvedt

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman.

Adrienne Rich

All those big words produce disgust today.

Dejan Stojanovic

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.

Jorge Luis Borges

Brave admiral say but one good word: What shall we do when hope is gone? The words leapt like a leaping sword: "Sail on! sail on! and on!"

Joaquin Miller

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied us with pillsfor bleeding, pills for panic.Wash them down the sink.This is truth, then:dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,weak acid in the bottom of the cup,foreboding, foreboding.No one tells the truth about truth,that it’s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow:dull-jawed, onrushingkiller, being thatinanely single-mindedwill have our skins at last.

Adrienne Rich

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

Adrienne Rich

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Siri Hustvedt

[John Edwards] is the man that Rielle Hunter called 'real and authentic,' which tells us all we need to know about her mental abilities. This is why she can't figure out why he picked her. He could have had a multitude of sweet young things but he chose a 42-year-old who is one bleach job away from turning into one big split end, because his tumescent ego demands that he be the pretty one.

Florence King

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

Danzy Senna

Tenderness is the repose of passion.

Joseph Joubert

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.

Walter Savage Landor

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One can find traces of every life in each life.

Susan Griffin

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

Thomas Mallon

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.

Jorge Luis Borges

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.

Chuck Klosterman

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.

Barbara Kingsolver

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

Virginia Woolf

Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune...

Plutarch

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.

Nick Hornby

Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.

Edward Readicker-Henderson

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

Edmund White

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

John Crowley

They are both spectacular, Life and death.

Dejan Stojanovic

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,

Anne Carson

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

Walker Percy

...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.

Marilynne Robinson

A man's vanity tells him what is honour a man's conscience what is justice.

Walter Savage Landor

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")

John Crowley

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Charles Baudelaire

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