Essayist Quotes

Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.

To me physical beauty is not the issue, vibrational beauty is and the most beautiful people I meet are those who are radiating the love and wisdom of the Divine force that breathes them.

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

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

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.

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?

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

George Saunders

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift.

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.

We hail Science as man's truest friend and noblest helper.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

Charles D'Ambrosio

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

Edward Dahlberg

Life is shapeless, but art, as everybody knows, is shaped.

Science is an ideal of the method of nature, and the production of that ideal is a true creation.

Samuel Morison Brown

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

"Love mocks us all"—as Horace said of old:
From sheer perversity, that arch-offender
Still yokes unequally the hot and cold,
The short and tall, the hardened and the tender;
He bids a Socrates espouse a scold,
And makes a Hercules forget his gender:—
Sic visum Veneri! Lest samples fail,
I add a fresh one from the page of BAYLE.

Henry Austin Dobson

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

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

David James Duncan

We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak.

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

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

[But if things continue the way they are]... the society that I envision, if my dream is not just a false notion, this society will have to begin to create itself in the midst of fuss, noisiness and panic, and will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war...

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