Mirrorings Essay Quotes

Purple light passed over the paper, but nothing happened.
"Next!" Amy said. She was sure the man in black was going to burst in on them any second.
"Whoa!" Dan said.
Amy gripped his arm. "You found it?"
"No, but look! This whole essay - 'To the Royal Academy.' He wrote a whole essay on farts!" Dan grinned with delight. "He's proposing a scientific study on different fart smells. You're right, Amy. This guy was a genius! ~ Rick Riordan

The word 'essay' comes from a root meaning 'trial' or 'attempt', ~ Gavin Francis

There's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live - ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I'm writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn't get the heroic death. She survives - and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones she loves are gone. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books.
And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum.
No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay. ~ Matthew Quick

Some portion of Woolf's genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. Woolf not only utilized but celebrated the unpredictable meander, on mind and foot. Her great essay "Street Haunting: A London Adventure,"from 1930, has the light breezy tone of many of her early essays, and yet voyages deep into the dark. ~ Rebecca Solnit

It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow's quip. "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus," wrote Wiley. "Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership." And there it was. I had accepted Bellow's premise. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness.

(essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art) ~ Martin Heidegger

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published. ~ Lee Gutkind

Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on 'the souls of beasts', and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need. ~ John N. Gray

I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write. ~ Dan Millman

I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I'd have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That's what I'd want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them. ~ Lily King

She was supposed to be writing an essay on how geography had shaped the great battles of the past, but she was having trouble concentrating. In fact, all she'd managed so far was a title. How Geography Has Shaped the Great Battles of the Past. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

You love tests?"
"Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What's not to love? ~ Nora Roberts

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

Henry David Thoreau is my favorite writer of all time, my literary god king, and his essay Wild Apples is my favorite thing to read. ~ Nicholas Trandahl

Even ivory towers need central heating. ~ Breyten Breytenbach

Wake not the Dead: - they bring but gloomy night
And cheerless desolation into day
For in the grave who mouldering lay,
No more can feel the influence of light,
Or yield them to the sun's prolific might;
Let them repose within their house of clay -
Corruption, wilt thou vainly e'er essay
To quicken: - it sends forth a prest'lent blight;
And neither fiery sun, nor bathing dew,
Nor breath of Spring the dead can e'er renew.
That which from life is pluck'd, becomes the foe
Of life, and whoso wakes it waketh woe.
Seek not the dead to waken from that sleep
In which from mortal eye they lie enshrouded deep. ~ Ludwig Tieck

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be ... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made. ~ Morton Feldman

The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein. ~ Karl Shapiro

Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."
That was all.
And that was everything. ~ Jack Canfield

A spinning stash is much more complex than a knitting stash. It is like the first mother goddess. Everything comes from it, and nothing happens without it. You can't have yarn without the fiber.

(From the essay 'Spinning Stash') ~ Jillian Moreno

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave. ~ William H Gass

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work. ~ Carl Andre

To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. ~ Sallie Tisdale

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things. ~ David Wroblewski

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this. ~ Maureen Johnson

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces. ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes. ~ Wilbur Smith

No truth is well understood until and unless all the errors it corrects are also understood and all the contradictions found are resolved. It is in the context of a plurality of errors to be corrected and of contradictions to be resolved that the brilliance of the truth shines out and illuminates the scene. ~ Mortimer Adler The Great Conversation Revisited Essay.

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

I had grown weary of so many rules. That's the thing about every discipline. There's often a format, a belief that if you don't follow the structure to the tiniest detail, you won't get the maximum value: mantras are private. Om is the most perfect sound in the universe. Never lay a sacred text to chant on the floor. If you are in a seminar, always wear a name tag. Put your name in the upper right hand corner of every essay. Just breathe. No, scream. No, cry or hit something. But don't lose yourself. Never do yoga on the full moon. Walk clockwise around a temple. Don't eat protein and starch in the same meal. Always begin the day with fruit. Don't eat any fruit. Never utter the word of G_d. There is no God. There are multiple gods. To be a good acupuncturist, "check your stuff" at the door. Bring all of you. Never do work on the Sabbath. Don't cary anything in your pockets. Consciousness is constant work. Accept Jesus. Read the Bible. There is no suffering. Acknowledge suffering as a noble truth. Tread lightly on the Earth. Leave no trace. Make your mark. Get noticed. Travel silently through life. Attend to the needs of others. Follow your bliss. Suppress. Express. Withhold. Let go. Let it in. Get off the grid. Join the marketplace. Go toward the light. Hadn't I heard enough? ~ Megan Griswold

I was missing lectures leading up to an essay test, so I went downstairs & got my textbook & pretended to study, with Animal Planet playing in the background. Everyone we learned about was either white or some sort of predecessor of the white, Christian world--as if the Stone Age, Bronze Age & Iron Age were just Greek & Roman stepping stones. As if everyone outside of Europe was still grunting & digging for grubs. As if China, centuries before Jesus started squalling in his crib, hadn't already kicked Europe's ass in technology & art. ~ L. Tam Holland

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. ~ Cynthia Ozick

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:

'Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.' And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, 'the plain facts of [whose] situation - on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms - made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.' Orwell's writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values.

This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing - under the name Matt Lowe - for John Middleton Murry's Adelphi. As he told his diary:

I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist.

Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by - none other than Orwe ~ Christopher Hitchens

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. ~ John D'Agata

Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.
Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958) ~ Rachel Carson

I think I've been mildly obsessed with my hair. I don't think I have a hugely adversarial relationship with it. One my essay is about my decision to keep coloring my hair once it started to go gray, but once I wrote the essay - once the book was in production - I decided to go gray. ~ Elizabeth Benedict

Judy Collins sings about in "The Blizzard," or read Alice Walker's essay "My Father's Country Is the Poor." Each ~ Gloria Steinem

the world produces more than enough food for all of us to thrive. ~ Francis Lappe