American Essayist Quotes

Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy

Louise Imogen Guiney

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Barbara Kingsolver

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 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.

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.

As is the case with so many things, deep appreciation and a sense of loss have arrived simultaneously.

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

William S. Burroughs

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