20th-century Essayist Quotes

Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived... I'm beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations... Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?

The age is rocking the wave
with human grief
to a golden beat, and an adder
is breathing in time with it in the grass.

Osip Mandelstam

I speak of knowledge, sir, which is not the bed-equal of learning... I speak of what comes from learning. I speak of understanding.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

David James Duncan

I really do believe that a novel has to be a feast of the senses, a delightful thing.

John Gardner (American writer)

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

I was compiling a list in my head titled 'Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here.

I have an immensity which shivers in the oceans,
being, as I am, only a little fountain, small as an eye.

Juan Antonio Villacañas

My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.

William T. Vollmann

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.

John Ralston Saul

Something stirs that once had life. It drops
Into the stream, a last act of faith.
Seedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,
These have outstayed their autumn, teasing death
Only so far, not yet beyond all patience.
Now they let go.

Donald Davidson (poet)

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

George Saunders

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Memories. form the building blocks of family history. They are the stories that survive in our kitchens and in our living rooms. Stories that tell it like it is about the way it was, the way it used to be. Some are humorous, others are painful, even embarrassing, but all of them make up the essence of African American history.

Henry Louis Gates

Fish were different 35-odd years ago, when I was a kid, and I would often visit fish markets no matter where I was. By and large, what we would see would be entirely wild fish. Forty-odd years ago, everything we ate from the sea was wild. Pretty much everything. Today almost half of what we eat is farmed. So it's a huge, huge shift.

The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

I like to think of landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

William S. Burroughs

The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. "Scattered showers, periods of sunshine."