Essayists Quotes

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession. ~ Virginia Woolf

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Jane Jacobs work wouldnt have been complete if it hadn't inspired others to carry it on, and evolve Jane's groundbreaking accomplishments so that the essential kernel of thought remains relevant for future generations. The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades. ~ Majora Carter

The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast. ~ E.B. White

Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language. ~ Christopher Buckley

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love. ~ Elizabeth Strout

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind. ~ John T. Flynn

Plenty of times I've seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you'd recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.
And who could blame them? Writers - all writers - need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member. ~ Richard Ford

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. ~ George Orwell

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate. ~ Sloane Crosley

What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way. ~ Meghan Daum

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. ~ William Ernest Henley

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications. ~ Meghan Daum

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist. ~ Richard Turner

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative. ~ Charles J. Shields

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas. ~ Alan Lightman

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. ~ Nicholson Baker

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair ... the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. ~ Oscar Wilde

Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it. ~ Richard Lederer

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity, among American Negroes, was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For, in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has
the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody
needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone towards all these. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers. ~ Leo Rosten

There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

By now, legions of tireless essayists and op-ed columnists have dressed feminists down for making such a fuss about entering the professions and earning equal pay that everyone's attention has been distracted from the important contributions of mothers working at home. This judgment presumes, of course, that prior to the resurgence of feminism in the '70s, housewives and mothers enjoyed wide recognition and honor. This was not exactly the case. ~ Mary Blakely

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Were I to personify Justice, instead of presenting her blind, I would denominate her the goddess of fire ... Of unbending integrity Justice should feel, hear and see; but truth alone should be the polar star by which she should shape her movements, and equity only should constrain her determinations. ~ Judith Sargent Murray

A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth. ~ C.S. Lewis

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget. ~ Arthur Miller

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody. ~ William Ernest Henley

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others. ~ Mary Karr

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city. ~ C.S. Lewis

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist's case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person's life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us - Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass - swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come. ~ Roger Angell

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school. ~ John D'Agata

Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I'm her slave. ~ Cyra McFadden

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist. ~ Jose Saramago

Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. ~ E.B. White

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves. ~ J.G. Ballard

If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair. ~ John D'Agata

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

[Speaking to a group of female students] Have you any notion how many books are written [by men] about women in the course of one year? (...) Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? (...)
Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women (...) were very angry (...) as they wrote (...) about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women. (...) Why were they angry? (...)
Possibly when the professor [imagined by V. Woolf as a prototype of patriarchal writer] insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. (...) Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch (...) of feeling that great number of people, half the human race indeed [=women], are by nature inferior to himself.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. (…) That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished (…)

A Room of One´s Own, chapter 2 ~ Virginia Woolf