Essayist Quotes

I have seen white settlers in Africa who had sworn that they would never sit down to table with those "smelly blacks" sit down quite happily with half-nude tribesmen once a country achieves independence. It is the context of power which changes behavior and transmutes antipathy into sympathy.

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?'

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.

And we are beginning to hear the groaning from our tortured planet. We are at a point when we must realize that if we want to continue to call this planet our home, we need to change - not the planet, but ourselves.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.