Essays Quotes - Page 16

• I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Focus, Musical, Important

  4 Copy quote

• I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Always Trying, Poetic, Property

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Fall, People, Forever

  Source: quarterlyconversation.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

  Lee Gutkind

  Pain, Book, Hard Work

  Source: speechwriting-ghostwriting.typepad.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.

  Robert Dessaix

  School, Giving, Waiting

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think I've been mildly obsessed with my hair. I don't think I have a hugely adversarial relationship with it. One my essay is about my decision to keep coloring my hair once it started to go gray, but once I wrote the essay - once the book was in production - I decided to go gray.

  Elizabeth Benedict

  Book, Thinking, Hair

  Source: nytlive.nytimes.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

  Ernst Haas

  Choices, Want, Facts

  13 Copy quote

• I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.

  Ruby Bentall

  Writing, School, Found

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

  Nicholson Baker

  Writing, People, Trying

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet" by Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

  James Ellroy

  Book, Past, Lakes

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Different, Pace, Legs

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Discovery, Essentials, Needs

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

  Alan Lightman

  Fiction, Jay Gould, Essayists

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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

• I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Needs, Looks

  "Interviews with Don DeLillo". Cinerepublic Interview, perival.com. April 22, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

  Don DeLillo

  Art, Challenges, Novelists

  "Don DeLillo's Hidden Truths". Interview with David Streitfield, perival.com. November 11, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Desire, Usual

  4 Copy quote

• Don't deliver an essay with so many points. No one can absorb it. Just say one thing... Of course, you can say the point in many different ways over and over again with different illustrations.

  Winston Churchill

  Illustration, Different, Way

  9 Copy quote

• My children, mark me. I pray you. Know! God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me, whether he would or no. To stop God loving me would be to rob him of his Godhood; for God is love no less than he is truth; as he is good, so is he love as well. It is the absolute truth, as God lives... If anyone would ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord essay to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.

  Meister Eckhart

  Children, Joy, Soul

  6 Copy quote

• Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay.

  Carlos Mencia

  Girl, Teacher, Years

  "Mind of Mencia". Sketch-comedy Series, 2005-2008.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Sentences, Reviewers

  4 Copy quote

• Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They're writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don't specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don't understand enough to explain.

  Tim Bray

  Recovery, Writing, Heart

  4 Copy quote

• So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays.
  What you do today is important, because you are sacrificing a day of your life for it.
  Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

  Mark Twain

  Tired, Sacrifice, Men

  90 Copy quote

• Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.

  Seymour Papert

  Writing, School, Kids

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The interesting thing about that is one of the greatest critics of socialism and leftwing writings was Robert Michels who wrote a series of essays called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" and in these essays he discusses how no matter what sorts of freedoms are advertised or put into a society structure, that all societies, all form of governments - whether they be a Roman republic, whether they be a democracy, whether they be a Russian communist system, whatever, a tribe... a tribal council - all of the continuously, throughout the ages, have all converted back into an oligarchy.

  Immortal Technique

  Writing, Government, Law

  Source: www.hiphopcanada.com

  41 Copy quote

  Show source