Top 100 John D'agata Quotes
#1. If I had to pick, I'd say my favorite book is 'A Prayer For Owen Meany', by John Irving.
Sarah Dessen
#2. For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."
John D'Agata
#3. In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.
John D'Agata
#4. An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.
John D'Agata
#5. If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.
John D'Agata
#6. Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.
John D'Agata
#7. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or - worse yet - leaving the blanks blank?
John D'Agata
#8. Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.
John D'Agata
#9. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.
John D'Agata
#10. If (my grandfather) hadn't left, I'd be working over here at the Albatross Company.
John F. Kennedy
#11. After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.
John D. Rockefeller
#12. Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.
John Barth
#13. I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop," said Mr. Gedeon. "He'd been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn't taken any of them. It's to be expected, I suppose. It's in his nature.
John Connolly
#14. 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
#15. And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd For one fair female, lost him half the kind.
John Dryden
#16. I'm into all types of stuff. I might have on Pumas one day, Givenchy the next. I'd wear this John Elliott sweat suit to the club.
Meek Mill
#17. John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
Ben Horowitz
#18. I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.
John D. MacDonald
#19. A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place.
John Rawls
#20. The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.
John D. Voelker
#21. I don't love the idea of three superstars coming together to form a dream team, I'd rather teams are built more organically, just as a fan it's more interesting to see.
John Legend
#22. What I'd have liked would have been the money and the hit records without the fame.
John Lennon
#23. If I found a cure for a huge disease, while I was hobbling up onstage to accept the Nobel Prize they'd be playing the theme song from 'Three's Company'.
John Ritter
#24. She knew more about these situations than she realized, he thought. She'd spent years at Duncan's side. "When in doubt," he added, "be pompous.
John Flanagan
#25. He'd known only that, in the end, the Force hadn't helped her. Or any of the other Jedi he'd heard about.
John Jackson Miller
#26. I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.
John D'Agata
#27. I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.
John D'Agata
#28. 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
#29. What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.
John D'Agata
#30. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.
John D'Agata
#31. Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.
John D'Agata
#32. I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.
John D'Agata
#33. I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.
John D'Agata
#34. Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.
John D'Agata
#35. The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.
John D'Agata
#36. You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.
John D'Agata
#37. It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.
John D'Agata
#38. A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.
John D'Agata
#39. He look'd in years, yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor, and autumnal green.
John Dryden
#40. Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.
John D'Agata
#41. Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.
John D'Agata
#42. I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.
John D'Agata
#43. The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.
John D'Agata
#44. I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.
John D'Agata
#45. And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.
John D'Agata
#46. I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.
John D'Agata
#47. Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.
John D'Agata
#48. As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.
John D'Agata
#49. You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist.
John D'Agata
#50. I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.
John D'Agata
#51. I was just genuinely shy. I'd always been a shy kid.
Elton John
#52. Reporter lady: What's that color? John: Hm. I'd call this a color!
John Lennon
#53. The name 'United Nations' was Franklin D. Roosevelt's idea. He rushed to tell Winston Churchill, who was towelling himself stark naked in his bathroom.
John Lloyd
#54. The only thing which is of lasting benefit to a man is that which he does for himself. Money which comes to him without effort on his part is seldom a benefit and often a curse.
John D. Rockefeller
#55. There's as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said - he'd rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.
John Wooden
#57. Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see.
John D. MacDonald
#58. If my leg falls off, I'll get a prosthetic. There'd be no deep sadness about. I'd just get on with it! It's called life, and I love life. You have to be positive, and you have to crack on no matter what.
John Lydon
#59. I hate to say it, but Christmas as a kid was always a moneymaking venture for me. I played trumpet, and a friend of mine who played trombone and a guy who played tuba, every Christmas we'd go out for three or four days beforehand and play Christmas carols on our horns.
John Tesh
#61. I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
John D. Rockefeller
#62. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God ... to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.
John D. Rockefeller
#63. And finally, count your blessings. You got through college. You didn't commit suicide, O.D., or have a nervous breakdown, and let's remember the ones who did. It's time to get busy. It's your turn to cause trouble.
John Waters
#64. If you told me I was going to live to 240, I would take 10 years off and try and act. I don't have that kind of time, so I'd much rather stick to playing guitar.
John Mayer
#65. Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest," Mrs. Grogan was saying, "and peace at last." Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud's, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he'd come a long way and still had a long way to go.
John Irving
#66. None But such as are good men can give good things, And that which is not good, is not delicious To a well-govern'd and wise appetite.
John Milton
#67. We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.
John Osborne
#68. I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.
John Wayne
#69. Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers' pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?
Aaron Swartz
#70. The local farmers, of course, were bitching because the bean and corn harvests were going to be huge and the prices depressed. Of course, if it hadn't rained, they'd be bitching because their crops were small, even if the prices were high. You couldn't win with farmers.
John Sandford
#71. Right away, I invited on guests like Steve Wozniak, John Draper, and even porn star Danni Ashe, who took her top off in the studio to show us all how hot she was. (Listen up, Howard Stern, I'm following in your footsteps!)
Kevin D. Mitnick
#72. Nothing is higher than heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than virtue.48
John D. Barrow
#73. When I get older losing my hair many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?
John Lennon
#74. Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush.
Andrew Sullivan
#75. This is the body's nurse; but since man's wit
Found the art of cookery, to delight his sense,
More bodies are consumed and kill'd with it
Than with the sword, famine, or pestilence.
John Davies Of Hereford
#76. I distrust those people who knew so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan D. Anthony
John Ortberg
#77. So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
John Keats
#78. Th' ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire, Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair.
John Milton
#79. I'd always maintained an image so that people wouldn't approach me.
John Lurie
#80. Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.
John Milton
#81. We have come so far. It's become a real bipartisan cause, which I'm very happy to see. And in the case of America, and it's - certainly, without America, we'd be facing catastrophe.
Elton John
#82. I'd always lived with people - my family, or had people living with me, because I'd never liked being on my own.
Elton John
#83. I say women exhibit the most exalted virtue when they depart from the domestic circle and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their G-d!
John Quincy Adams
#84. We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.
John Wyndham
#85. To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.
Robert Krulwich
#87. The preacher said, "She looks tar'd.' "Women's always tar'd,' said Tom. "That's just the way women is, 'cept at meetin' once an' again.
John Steinbeck
#88. The book is what we have come to expect from Marion: challenging, subtle and nuanced analyses, dassling formulations, . a provocative and original philosophical genius.
John D. Caputo
#89. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#90. It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
John D. MacDonald
#91. Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. (Off topic, but: What a slut time is.
John Green
#92. I'd had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#93. I'd like to be in anything that tells a good story and has an interesting character.
John Boyega
#94. As it's your 40th birthday
This, we'd like to say
May you be bathed in goodness, happiness and sunshineness
On this, your special day.
John Walter Bratton
#96. Then love of pleasure sways each heart, and we From that no more than from ourselves can fly. Blameless when govern'd well. But where it errs Extravagant, and wildly leads to ill, Public or private, there its curbing pow'r Cool reason must exert.
John Armstrong
#97. Here and there, alone, reflecting, I'd bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face.
John Darnielle
#98. I love thee like puddings; if thou wert pie I'd eat thee.
John Ray
#99. I'd rather make music if I had the talent.
John Hughes
#100. I could have begged. They made it obvious to me that if I wanted to come back and be a good boy ... but I'd rather be in Roots than Good Times.
John Amos
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