Essays Quotes - Page 8

• Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

  Sophie Kinsella

  Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas

  "Big ideas". Interview With Alice Wignall, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2004.

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• Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.

  Leigh Newman

  Brother, Moving, Book

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• People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

  Charles Darwin

  Writing, Men, Thinking

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• I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  "Exclusive: Jonathan Franzen sounds off on bird poaching, climate change and 'performing love'". Interview with Lindsay Abrams, www.salon.com. April 27, 2015.

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• I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.

  David Shrigley

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

  Tom Stoppard

  Thinking, Interesting, Stories

  'Night and Day' (1978) act 1

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• In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Gay, Individual Choice, Two

  "Pandora and Polygamy". jewishworldreview.com. March 17, 2006.

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• I know The past and thence I will essay to glean A warning for the future, so that man May profit by his errors, and derive Experience from his folly; For, when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Past, Men, Errors

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.98, Delphi Classics

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• Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

  Sloane Crosley

  Differences, Jersey, Curtains

  "Sloane Crosley Talks About Writing Her First Novel, The Clasp, With A.M. Homes". www.vulture.com. May 31, 2015.

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• The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Block, Men, Evil

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour; but withal told him, he should die like a man, lest he should be proud, and flatter himself that God hath with his name imparted unto him his nature also. JOHN LOCKE, "Of a King", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political A king may be a tool, a thing of straw; but if he serves to frighten our enemies, and secure our property, it is well enough: a scarecrow is a thing of straw, but it protects the corn.

  Alexander Pope

  Kings, Men, Names

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• When an alluring woman comes in at the door," warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, "discretion may be found up the chimney". It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: "The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly.

  Ernest Bramah

  Doors, Should Have, Profound

  Ernest Bramah (1963). “The Celestial Omnibus”

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• I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it.

  Doris McCarthy

  Art, Writing, Use

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• The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Writing, Pieces, Favourite

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• The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

  Herbert Spencer

  Art, Expression, Feelings

  Herbert Spencer (1868). “Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative”, p.46

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• Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

  Dan Savage

  Growing Up, Book, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

  Robert Scholes

  Past, Play, Stories

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• If one writing contributed more than any other to the framework in which this work Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions developed, it would be an essay entitled 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' published in the American Economic Review of September 1945, and written by F. A. Hayek . . In this plain and apparently simple essay was a deeply penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood.

  Thomas Sowell

  Writing, Simple, Decision

  "Knowledge and Decisions". Book by Thomas Sowell, 1980.

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• I always did well on the essay questions. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you'll hit it.

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Wells, Knows

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• Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

  John D'Agata

  Sometimes, Ends, Knows

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• My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

  Ishmael Reed

  Book, Writing, Boxing

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Mind, Juxtaposition, Attention

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Writing, Might, Way

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

  Pattiann Rogers

  Book, Order, Important

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Winter, Thinking

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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