Essayists Quotes - Page 5

• In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

  George Orwell

  Fighting, Perception, Enemy

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.198, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Life, Success, Education

  Cheryl Strayed (2015). “Brave Enough: A Mini Instruction Manual for the Soul”, p.10, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Love, Forgiveness, Kindness

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.108, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Forgiveness, Believe, Novelists

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.195, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.

  Dejan Stojanovic

  Lying, Knights, Knighthood

  "The Sun Watches the Sun". Book by Dejan Stojanovic, "Eternity and Eternity" (p. 32), 1999.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

  Alexander Chee

  Spiritual, Writing, Thinking

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

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

  William Rounseville Alger

  Poetry, Literature, Natural

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• So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Men, Self

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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