20th-century Essayist Quotes

Go your way, seducers, flatterers, idlers, those glib of tongue and charlatans; I am not a seed that you can force to grow; my goal differs so from yours that I would be wasting my time in trying to explain where my inclination drives me.

Dominique Fernandez

To me physical beauty is not the issue, vibrational beauty is and the most beautiful people I meet are those who are radiating the love and wisdom of the Divine force that breathes them.

The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist feeds off woman's true energy source, i.e. her woman-identified self. It is he who recognises that if female spirit, mind, creativity and sexuality exist anywhere in a powerful way it is here, among lesbian-feminists.

Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.

Magic is what happens when you have encountered the Divine. It is the life-altering experiences of connecting to the divinity that dwells within yourself and in the world.

The new anticapitalist are, in spirit and motive, deontologists, and thus criticized not so much the consequences of capitalism (though this teleological elements is present), but motives, e.g., the profit motive, acquisitiveness, 'materialism' and the like.

A hydrogen-rich environment exposed to energy in the presence of carbon — conditions that certainly existed throughout our solar system, if not the universe — will, by the rules of chemistry, produce the building blocks of life.

I discovered that nothing really matters except not being old and being alive and having potential to dream about, and not being alone.

James Alan McPherson

I have seen white settlers in Africa who had sworn that they would never sit down to table with those "smelly blacks" sit down quite happily with half-nude tribesmen once a country achieves independence. It is the context of power which changes behavior and transmutes antipathy into sympathy.

Fashion is in ceaseless pursuit of things that are about to look familiar and in uneasy flight from things that have just become a bore.

Thirty, thirty-five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives, and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting.

Evan S. Connell

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it.... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull.

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.

Patient, dramatic, serious, genial,
From over to over the game goes on,
Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial,
Civilisation under the sun.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

Charles D'Ambrosio

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Alice McDermott

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

In Russia, people suffer from the stillness of time.

Tatyana Tolstaya

I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.

To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.

Philosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute

Life sends us messages all the time - then sits around laughing over how we're not gonna be able to figure them out.