Quotes by Essayists

Should the whole frame of nature round him break,In ruin and confusion hurled,He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,And stand secure amidst a falling world.
Joseph Addison
there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.
Jonathan Franzen
The classic Aryan who idolized himself and who existed in his own dreams could not bear to see the Jew, the evidence of divine reality,and he would kill him.
André Frossard
I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.
Jorge Luis Borges
And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
Chuck Klosterman
To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.
Flannery O'Connor
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
Thomas Mann
Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.
Charles Simic
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
We go to Europe to be Americanized.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who can believe in illusion even if we all live the Illusion of Life?
Sorin Cerin
Who can say that he is not everything?
Sorin Cerin
You can just be your self’s stranger, never its friend, because you are mortal and it is immortal!
Sorin Cerin
Who can play without wanting to succeed even with a sentimentally gain?
Sorin Cerin
Do not waste the moment of your life which comes together with death because you will bitterly regret the alienation of your own self.
Sorin Cerin
No tiredness can destroy hope like death can, as the absolute fatigue of life.
Sorin Cerin
Do not be to yourself more that God may be to you.
Sorin Cerin
We can never succeed in knowing our own self without holidays and anniversaries.
Sorin Cerin
Heroes are the saints of every nation.
Sorin Cerin
Being brave in front of faith does not mean to be humble before death.
Sorin Cerin
No one can be alone when he befriends with the forgotten stranger inside him.
Sorin Cerin
Nothing can be more painful than the cry of the word which gave us the inspiration to dream of love.
Sorin Cerin
Being is the greatest paradox of life in front of death.
Sorin Cerin
We are a being only through our Illusion of Life.
Sorin Cerin
We will never be more than we are meant to be!
Sorin Cerin
Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection.(V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)
John Ralston Saul
The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
Virginia Woolf
You never do any good until you get into some trouble.
Arthur Miller
For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited
Virginia Woolf
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Flannery O'Connor
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
William Hazlitt
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.
Sarah Ruhl
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
I hate parties.And a wedding is the biggest party of all.All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower.He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them.Then I have to greet them.A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.
Sarah Ruhl
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.
Sarah Ruhl
The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
E B White
It is a happy talent to know how to play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because they know they were not the ones the words were spoken to.
Marilynne Robinson
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
Charles Baudelaire
...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanisław Lem
It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
Chuck Klosterman
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass
In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.
Joseph Brodsky
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
…my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
John Jay Chapman
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Charles Baudelaire
As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
Nicola Chiaromonte
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf
Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.
E B White