Essays Quotes - Page 15

• There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.

  Robert Southey

  Book, Advice, Digestion

  Robert Southey (1865). “The Doctor, Etc”, p.99

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• How do our philosophers act? Do they not inscribe their signatures to the very essays they write on the propriety of despising glory.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Writing, Signatures, Philosopher

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• There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

  Virginia Woolf

  Literature, Rooms, Impurity

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.12, Oxford University Press

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• Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Unity, Answers

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.425, Harvard University Press

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• If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Decision, Mind, Trials

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.611, Stanford University Press

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• The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

  Ray Bradbury

  Mean, Years, Gears

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• When I heard the book (Thomas Friedman's latest) was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.

  Matt Taibbi

  Book, Writing, Two

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• Talking Taboo is a groundbreaking book. This chorus of bold female voices is presenting the church with an opportunity to engage real but all too frequently avoided or unseen issues impacting countless Christian women today. Their candid essays cover a wide spectrum of perspectives. Readers will resonate with some and be shocked by others. Talking Taboo took courage to write. Reading taboo takes courage too. So buckle up and brace yourself for an eye-opening but vitally important read!

  Carolyn Custis James

  Christian, Real, Book

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• I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.

  Vijay Seshadri

  Voice, Determined, Individual

  "You Are Vijay Seshadri". Interview with Laura Standley, logger.believermag.com. June 10, 2014.

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• For almost a quarter of a century, Teen Ink has been encouraging young people to write - and then has published those pieces. These heartfelt essays and poems explore the issues faced by teenagers today. I applaud their efforts because they not only help young people deal with their own lives but also encourage the budding authors of the next generation.

  Anita Silvey

  Teenager, Writing, Issues

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• Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.

  Seymour Papert

  Writing, School, Kids

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

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• I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Different, Pace, Legs

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

  James Ellroy

  Book, Past, Lakes

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

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• Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

  Nicholson Baker

  Writing, People, Trying

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet" by Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

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• I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.

  Ruby Bentall

  Writing, School, Found

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

  Ernst Haas

  Choices, Want, Facts

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• 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

  Book, Thinking, Hair

  Source: nytlive.nytimes.com

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• I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.

  Robert Dessaix

  School, Giving, Waiting

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• 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

  Pain, Book, Hard Work

  Source: speechwriting-ghostwriting.typepad.com

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• In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Fall, People, Forever

  Source: quarterlyconversation.com

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• I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Always Trying, Poetic, Property

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Discovery, Essentials, Needs

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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

  Fiction, Jay Gould, Essayists

  Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

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• Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Views, Matter

  Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

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• So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays.
  What you do today is important, because you are sacrificing a day of your life for it.
  Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

  Mark Twain

  Tired, Sacrifice, Men

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