American Essayist Quotes

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

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

Barbara Holland

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.

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.

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

Jonathan Lethem

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Marilynne Robinson

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

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.

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

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

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.

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

Is this not in fact the purpose of young Americans going abroad? To make them think of things they never thought of?

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.

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

Edmund Clarence Stedman

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

Edward Dahlberg

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

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

William S. Burroughs

In spite of Jean-Jacques and his school, men are not everywhere born free, any more than they are everywhere in chains, unless these be of their own individual making.

Francis Marion Crawford