Essayist Quotes

I've always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another…… transition zones, boundaries and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle.

I speak of knowledge, sir, which is not the bed-equal of learning... I speak of what comes from learning. I speak of understanding.

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

Marilynne Robinson

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

Edward Dahlberg

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.

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.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

Much of traditional magic takes place by the light of the Moon. In the night world we are closer to the unconscious, the hidden, that which has yet to be made manifest, that which is suppressed and as yet realized. Past, present, and future are simultaneously one in the realm of the unconscious. Night is when this world and the other world can meet.

Vivianne Crowley

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

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

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

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

George Saunders

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.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

Archibald Alison

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.

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.

Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

In Russia, people suffer from the stillness of time.

Tatyana Tolstaya

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

Barbara Holland

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

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.

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

Jonathan Lethem

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

Charles D'Ambrosio

… far greater Advantages would come to pass amongst Christians, if they would cease from Contention, Oppression, and (what tends and disposes them thereunto,) the killing of Beasts, and eating their Flesh and Blood; and in a short time humane murthers, and devilish feuds and cruelties among each other, would abate, and perhaps scarce have a being amongst them.