Essayists Quotes - Page 5

• I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Life, Beautiful, Knowing

  "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar". Book by Cheryl Strayed, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 10, 2012.

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• Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Life, Change

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• It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

  Douglas Adams

  Funny, Humorous, Hands

  Douglas Adams (2014). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Life, Success

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• Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hope, Children, Dragons

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  Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

  Joseph Addison

  Love, Inspirational, Life

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• Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

  Samuel Johnson

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Samuel Johnson, Francis William Blagdon (1811). “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia”, p.42

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• The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

  Donald Knuth

  Machines, Algorithms, Way

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• In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Novelists, Essays

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• Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it.

  Andrew Lam

  First Love, Careers, Fiction

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

  Phillip Lopate

  Novelists, Might, Wonderful

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll likely only get to address one.

  Marty Nemko

  Book, Writing, Years

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Photography, Art, Strong

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• Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly, it’s something more animal and more fickle- more like lust.  We don’t lust after very many things in life.  We don’t need words like ‘worklust’ or ‘homemakinglust.’ But travel?  The essayist Anatole Broyard put it perfectly: ‘Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country.  To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live… in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.’

  Elisabeth Eaves

  Country, Passion, Animal

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• Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

  Diane Johnson

  Brave Person, Frail, Persons

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• Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Perfect

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• The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.

  Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

  Simple, Class, Justice

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• Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I'm her slave.

  Cyra McFadden

  Writing, Heart, Winning

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• Jane Jacobs work wouldnt have been complete if it hadn't inspired others to carry it on, and evolve Jane's groundbreaking accomplishments so that the essential kernel of thought remains relevant for future generations. The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades.

  Majora Carter

  People, Accomplishment, Essentials

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• Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Poetry, Literature, Natural

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• The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who enjoy bird walks enjoys theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

  E. B. White

  Country, Writing, Men

  E. B. White (2014). “Essays of E. B. White”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

  John D'Agata

  Believe, Want, Chairs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Views, Matter

  Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

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• I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

  John D'Agata

  School, Program, Grad

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

  Meghan Daum

  Book, Done, Firsts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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