American Essayist Quotes

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Herman Melville

William S. Burroughs

Chuck Palahniuk

Willa Cather

David Foster Wallace

Michael Chabon

Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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

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.

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

William S. Burroughs

Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.

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.

Age... is a matter of feeling, not of years.

George William Curtis

I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'

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

If a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

There is generally no such thing as duty to the people who do it. They simply take life as it comes, meeting, not, shirking its demands, whether pleasant or unpleasant; and that is pretty much all there is of it.

Mary Abigail Dodge

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

Randall Jarrell

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

Barbara Kingsolver

What is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water?

Herman Melville

What I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I'm recycling.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

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.

Science has but one fashion - to lose nothing once gained...

Edmund Clarence Stedman

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

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

As long as man labors for a physical existence, though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural; it is life, though that of this world, for which he instinctively works.

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

David Foster Wallace

In the moon's eclipse,
The earth's round shadow on its face I see!
I read God's works, which are his book indeed,
And trust the hint that falleth from his lips
More than all man's infallibility.

Minot Judson Savage

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?