American Essayist Quotes

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.

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