The Essay On Quotes

#1. Climb up the ladder one step at a time, moving gracefully to the rhythm of your own heart.
- from the essay, On The Side of Time, Amazed.

Joanne Crisner Alcayaga

#2. Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

Lynne Truss

#3. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay

Ursula K. Le Guin

#4. I spend the rest of the night doing schoolwork. After striking a match and lighting a candal, I sit down at my desk with my quill pen and parchment to write an essay for my ethics class on the legalities of fan fiction.

Fanny Merkin

#5. Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.
(Essay on Tea, 1757.)

Samuel Johnson

#6. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

#7. I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.

Sam Yagan

#8. Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.

Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.

(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")

Cameron Awkward-Rich

#9. I wrote my senior essay on the Santa Fe Writer's Colony and my dissertation on sacred landscapes - the Grand Canyon, the Dakota Badlands. As a setting, I love the West. I just love that western landscape.

Elise Broach

#10. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

Stanley Kubrick

#11. A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Alan Ryan

#12. The best approach is to write a narrative, "slice of life" essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.

Janine Robinson

#13. ... in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face "lit up by a divine light"
and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul
slips through.

Anne Carson

#14. Essay on tragedy.
(1) The silence of Prometheus.
(2) The Elizabethans.
(3) Moliere.
(4) The spirit of revolt.

Albert Camus

#15. The rabbit is one of the few animals that (de facto) enjoys screwing: after copulating it does a backward flip and drums on the ground. If it could light up a fag, it would no doubt do that too, and blow smoke rings into the sky.

Peter Zilahy

#16. I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

#17. In a British University, a final exam question on Business was:
"Define what risk is".
The shortest answer ever at one word was :
"This."
The student handed the essay in and got 100%.

Anonymous

#18. I smelled war on the horizon, with more deaths and trouble to come
Bombing of the Twin Towers
From Rape of a Nation by Sara Niles

Sara Niles

#19. 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

#20. I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#21. The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.
The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

Maureen Johnson

#22. This is very creative, said Mrs. Fretag, and she began to read my essay. The words sounded good to me. Everybody was listening. My words filled the room, from blackboard to blackboard, they hit the ceiling and bounced off, they covered Mrs. Fretag's shoes and piled up on the floor.

Charles Bukowski

#23. Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

Sloane Crosley

#24. Lucy: Our teacher wants us to write an essay on praying. Charlie Brown: Praying is important when you wake up at two o'clock in the morning feeling sick from eating something dumb the day before. Lucy: I'll just say we were out of town and I didn't have time to write anything.

Charles M. Schulz

#25. Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Pankaj Mishra

#26. ...life is like an essay. Each day is a new draft- identify the strengths and build on them; identify the weaknesses and make them strengths. Then your life will get better and better.

Arthur Costa

#27. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

#28. As a boy, I was ashamed to wear glasses. I memorized the eye chart, and then on the test they asked essay questions.

Woody Allen

#29. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!

Anne Carson

#30. British writer G. K. Chesterton's reply to an invitation by the Times to write an essay on the subject "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's response: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton

Dale Carnegie

#31. 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

#32. But selfishness can take on many disguises. It can also be about defending and trying to prove your own belief system while denying there could be value in the beliefs of others.

Karlyle Tomms

#33. I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Dylan Thomas

#34. In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

Constance Baker Motley

#35. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

G.K. Chesterton

#36. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Sam Hamill

#37. Plutarch has written an essay on the benefits which a man may receive from his enemies; and among the good fruits of enmity, mentions this in particular, that by the reproaches which it casts upon us, we see the worst side of ourselves.

Joseph Addison

#38. 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

#39. So I sat on the grimy floor of an eighteenth-century corn mill and watched my fiance heal the guy I loved.
"Wow," I muttered. "I'm gonna have one messed-up 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' essay when I get back to Hex Hall.

Rachel Hawkins

#40. 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

#41. I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.

Joel Salatin

#42. Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#43. 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

#44. No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car ... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#45. Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as 'too long.

Wes Locher

#46. Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.

Frederick Pollock

#47. I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

Galen Rowell

#48. In high school I wrote an essay on baseball and my teacher told me I had to rewrite it on a more serious topic. So I wrote an essay about the World Series and my teacher gave up.

Tucker Elliot

#49. I always did well on the essay questions. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you'll hit it.

Jerry Seinfeld