Essayists Quotes

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

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.

What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

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.

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

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.

Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.

We were together. I forget the rest.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

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.

There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.

All paths cause pain, so to chose the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain, only less beauty.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

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

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.’

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

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.

I find that white people in general, including white liberals and even revolutionaries, are most inclined to call you a racist when they don't want to confront the ugly realities that their racism has created. In their eyes, when you attempt to address those realities from your perspective you become a racist.

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.