Essays Quotes - Page 14

• "Stupid English."
  "English isn't stupid," I say.
  "Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me."
  "Why not?"
  "He says lunch isn't a subject."
  I glance at him. "It isn't."
  "Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?"

  Jodi Picoult

  Teacher, Stupid, Writing

  "House Rules". Book by Jodi Picoult, March 2, 2010.

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

  Nora Roberts

  Multiple Choice, Choices, True Or False

  Nora Roberts (2008). “Tribute”, p.235, Penguin

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• I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

  George Steiner

  Art, Believe, Difficult Questions

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• Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.

  Vijay Seshadri

  Character, Self, Interesting

  "You Are Vijay Seshadri". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. June 10, 2014.

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• From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

  Nora Ephron

  Book, Men, Editors

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• I grew up poor in crappy situations various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.

  Corey Taylor

  Kings, Growing Up, Reading

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.

  Clarice Lispector

  Beautiful, School, Knowing

  Clarice Lispector, Giovanni Pontiero (1996). “Descoberta Do Mundo”, p.161, New Directions Publishing

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• I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

  Michael Connelly

  Art, Quality, Redemption

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• I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

  Ayelet Waldman

  Honesty, Mean, Computer

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• When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.

  Will Ferrell

  Soccer, Player, Comedian

  "Duncan Riddle - America's Adult Soccer Ambassador". Interview with Diane Scavuzzo, goalnation.com. October 19, 2015.

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• From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

  Umberto Eco

  Lying, Long, Steps

  "Umberto Eco: 'People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged'". Interview with Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. November 27, 2011.

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• It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Long

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.85, Canongate Books

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• I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

  Sloane Crosley

  Writing, Two, Voice

  "Book Talk: Sloane Crosley hits brothels and clowns in new essays". Interview with Belinda Goldsmith, www.reuters.com. June 23, 2010.

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• I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

  Sloane Crosley

  Thinking, Insane, Sound

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• I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

  Sloane Crosley

  Jobs, Writing, Thinking

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• Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another.

  Boris Johnson

  Baby, Damn, Crisis

  "Exams work because they're scary". Daily Telegraph, May 12, 2005.

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• The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

  Stanley Fish

  Mean, Giving, Style

  "How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One". Book by Stanley Fish, 2011.

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• Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Plato, Latin, Buddhism

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• I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

  William Styron

  Book, Writing, Past

  William Styron (1993). “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings”, Vintage

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• I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.

  Richard Salter Storrs

  Teaching, Believe, Expression

  Richard Salter Storrs (1875). “Conditions of success in preaching without notes, 3 lects”, p.61

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• If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

  Anne Fadiman

  Girl, Father, Writing

  1998 On her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned man-ofletters. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.

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• I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

  Ray Bradbury

  Art, Philosophy, Book

  "Fahrenheit 451". Book by Ray Bradbury, 1953.

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• The argument culture urges us to approach the world - and the people in it - in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides'; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize.

  Deborah Tannen

  Party, Thinking, Ideas

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• Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

  Aaron Belz

  Teaching, Writing, Ideas

  "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". Interview with Susan Lerner, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.

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• the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Art, Class, Fiction

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