Quotes by Essayists - Page 102

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O'Connor
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Virginia Woolf
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
Charles Baudelaire
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valéry
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Jorge Luis Borges
A book is a suicide postponed.
Emil M. Cioran
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
E B White
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Ishmael Reed
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Virginia Woolf
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf
We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern. He says with Swinburne, "Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things," or with Steinbeck, "In the end was the word and the word was with men." For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage and dignity and pride and must consider it a point of honor to be satisfied with this. There is another type of modern man who recognizes a divine being not himself, but who does not believe that this being can be known anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally. Spirit and matter are separated for him. Man wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can't identify, trying to reach a God he can't approach, a God powerless to approach him. And there is another type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.
Flannery O'Connor
It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.
Flannery O'Connor
The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spare the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing.
Marilynne Robinson
Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.
Marilynne Robinson
I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.
Marilynne Robinson
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? ... This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate.
Marilynne Robinson
cleave not to faith when faith brings blood." - Rev. John Hale
Arthur Miller
Truth never dies.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)
Jose Bergamin
I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?
Dejan Stojanovic
I have lost the consolation of faith/ though not the ambition to worship
Forrest Gander
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
Marilynne Robinson
To the knights of faith nobody believes.
Dejan Stojanovic
Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanisław Lem
I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E B White
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poetry of love is the greatest gift God gave us.
Sorin Cerin
Suddenly, I was stopped by a quiet song . .Somebody stood, swaying slowly on the road,In the darkest shadow by a puddle,And low above it a small tree grew . .It might’ve been a wild cherry tree . .He kept singing, watching the puddle fill . .I dragged the pine through the water,And with my other hand steadied my sack,Where a bottle of red vino dangled . .He didn’t move, but kept on singing . .Should I have stopped thereAnd joined his singing? . .Had he foundThe one happy tree? . .No one knows where it grows—Or what it looks like . .And who is allowed to recognize it? . .I never stood under it,Even to wait for rain to passOr watch between the dropsThe silent froth appear . .Swaying, he kept on singing . .Otherwise, he would have fallenAnd the rain stopped . .He danced his own rainUnder that tree . .I can’t do such things . .Perhaps it was a wolf? . .
Oleh Lysheha
Songs of myselfClear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
Walt Whitman
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.
John Crowley
the bouquetBetween me and the worldyou are a bay, a sailthe faithful ends of a ropeyou are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry.Between me and the worldyou are a picture frame, a windowa field covered in wildflowersyou are a breath, a bed,a night that keeps the stars company.Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compassa ray of light that slips through the gloomyou are a biographical sketch, a book marka preface that comes at the end.between me and the worldyou are a gauze curtain, a mista lamp shining in my dreamsyou are a bamboo flute, a song without wordsa closed eyelid carved in stone.Between me and the worldyou are a chasm, a poolan abyss plunging downyou are a balustrade, a walla shield’s eternal pattern.
Bei Dao
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The faster you go, the idler you get.
Ferreira Gullar
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. Gass
It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
Louise Glück
The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.
Louise Glück
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E B White
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.
Carolyn Kizer
Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.
E B White
Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Walt Whitman
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.
Jane Hirshfield
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf
Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
William Hazlitt
I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.
Osip Mandelstam