20th-century Essayist Quotes

Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

Chuck Palahniuk

Reason is necessarily the language of moral, political, and scientific argument: not because reason is holy or on some elevated plane, but because it isn't; because it is accessible to all humans; because, as well as working, it can be seen to work.

Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

Quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

And we are beginning to hear the groaning from our tortured planet. We are at a point when we must realize that if we want to continue to call this planet our home, we need to change - not the planet, but ourselves.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

Edward Dahlberg

I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

Randall Jarrell

Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

Barbara Holland

Another reason I wrote Fat Girl is that few writers about fatties write that even thin girls (and women and men) can, behind their bony walls, remain fat. They weigh 110; they think they weigh 200. How this happens is that if a person's been fat and gotten thin and maybe even stayed thin, she doesn't forget she was fat.

They say there is a difference between actual temperature and perceived temperature, but in the bearable heaviness of being the actual measure is no doubt the weight we perceive.

Fausto Cercignani

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,

Marilynne Robinson

Any and all religions are real, the genuine article, to their practitioners. There can never be one religion, prophet, or savior that will satisfy all six billion humans. Each of us must find our ideal way to attune with deity.

Scott Cunningham

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

Jonathan Lethem

Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

So I feel that this is an encouragement to other writers in the region to persist in the their work, even if they feel that what they are doing is not popular, because in the long run it may tell on their behalf.

When a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

Alice Thomas Ellis

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

Barbara Kingsolver