Essayists Quotes - Page 5

• No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.

  Zbigniew Herbert

  Grief, Grieving, Rose

  Zbigniew Herbert (2014). “The Collected Poems 1956 - 1998”, p.19, Atlantic Books Ltd

  77 Copy quote

  Show source

• Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Memories, Knives, Novelists

  17 Copy quote

• You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Funny, Truth, Humorous

  129 Copy quote

• In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Life, Hate, Believe

  228 Copy quote

• Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, Work, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2002). “The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: Selected and Edited by Lewis Hyde”, p.283, North Point Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

  Harry Crews

  Work, Creativity, Cutting

  42 Copy quote

• A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

  Vivian Gornick

  Life, Truth, Believe

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Diane Johnson

  Brave Person, Frail, Persons

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  William Rounseville Alger

  Poetry, Literature, Natural

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source