Essays With Quotes

#1. In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

John D'Agata

#2. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

Donald McCaig

#3. I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

Susan Straight

#4. They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart.

W.B.Yeats

#5. Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.

Joyce Appleby

#6. I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

Siri Hustvedt

#7. Hairwoman is torturing us with essays. Do English teachers spend their vacations dreaming up these things?

Laurie Halse Anderson

#8. Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.

Octavio Paz

#9. Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Nicholas Kristof

#10. It wasn't enough that I had to worry about playing well and winning the game, but I also had to deal with possibility that one of my teammates could be dragged off the field by the inhabitants of the mental hospital.

Wes Locher

#11. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

Don DeLillo

#12. Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book.

Pattiann Rogers

#13. Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Kate Christensen

#14. I think - the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

Jorge Luis Borges

#15. To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.

Jonas Mekas

#16. There are often multiple sources for some famous statements by King; as a professional speaker and minister he used some significant phrases with only slight variation many times in his
essays, books, and his speeches to different audiences.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#17. The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post.

Steve Rubel

#18. I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#19. The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.

Will Durant

#20. Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

Marilynne Robinson

#21. I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

Chelsea Cain

#22. Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting.

Emilia Clarke

#23. I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.

Oliver Sacks

#24. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.

Kate Zambreno

#25. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

Ishmael Reed

#26. I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.

Michel De Montaigne

#27. 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

#28. In a series of wonderful essays, Evan Handler gives himself up to us - warts and all. To our amusement and bemusement we share in his emotional growth as he struggles to mature. I not only laughed along with him but felt that I too had grown a little along the way. Who could ask for more?

Lewis Black

#29. 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

#30. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.

Henry David Thoreau