Essay Quotes

God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please
you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect] — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. — Barbara Kingsolver

I make them up,' I tell them. 'Out of my head. — Neil Gaiman

Life is an essay you yourself have to write, start to finish. — Mo

Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam. — Alan Blinder

I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me. — Sandra Cisneros

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured. — Alberto Manguel

If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story. — Barbara Greene

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. — John D'Agata

You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from. — Peter Zilahy

The Canadian-Australian mathematician Norman Wildberger has posted an essay arguing that real numbers are a joke. — Max Tegmark

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

Writing a long essay is probably the most complex constructive act that most human beings areever expected to perform. — Carl Bereiter

The word 'essay' comes from a root meaning 'trial' or 'attempt', — Gavin Francis

Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach. — Alexander Pope

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

It's not that I haven't had a good life. It's that I hadn't allowed myself to live a great one.
- from the essay Dear Someone, Amazed. — Joanne Crisner Alcayaga

This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing — Michael Chabon

Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all? — Brian Ferneyhough

It's like rock n' roll for your eyes. — Paul Howard

History begins in novel and ends in essay. — Thomas B. Macaulay

I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it. — Doris McCarthy

The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. — David Foster Wallace

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. — John D'Agata

How do I know what I think until I see what I say? — E. M. Forster

Wifehood and motherhood ... are a bigger handicap than the average male genius would ... essay to carry to success. — Marie Pitt

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

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

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. — John D'Agata

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy — Theodor Adorno

As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent. — Bruce Springsteen

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

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. — Aldous Huxley

Must being in love always mean being in pain? — Alain De Botton

The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein. — Karl Shapiro

I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance' ... — Ransom Riggs

An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. — Carol Bly

Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy. — Terry Pratchett

Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave. — William H Gass

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel. — Kathleen Rooney

I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change. — John D'Agata

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward. — David Shields

A photo essay (otherwise known as a fucking slide show)... — Caroline Kepnes

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

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay. — Rivers Cuomo

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. — Virginia Woolf

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in. — Jodie Foster

Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart's desire, but sorrier still for those who did. — Laurie Lee

Never say more than is necessary. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below! — Edmund Waller

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

The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once. — Amy Leach

The tagline at Westin hotels is that they strive to surprise and delight their guests. This is exactly what a college essay should do. — Kate Klise

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm. — Jason Najum

Too bad relationships weren't math problems with precise answers. They were essay questions in a philosophy class, and they came down to judgement. — Lauren Blakely

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. — T. S. Eliot

Even ivory towers need central heating. — Breyten Breytenbach

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. — Pankaj Mishra

Essay on tragedy.
(1) The silence of Prometheus.
(2) The Elizabethans.
(3) Moliere.
(4) The spirit of revolt. — Albert Camus

It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship. — Chris Abani

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. — Donna Tartt

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest. — Jane Yolen

Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay. — Ray Bradbury

Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay. — Carlos Mencia

An idea might spark an essay, but never a story. — Amy Hempel

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy. — Eula Biss

To the student I would say, Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question. — Robert Breault

That would make a fantastic college entrance essay. 'I Killed My Boyfriend and Still Managed to Maintain a 4.2 GPA and the Lead in the Spring Musical. — Robin Benway

The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me. — Sara Levine

There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit. — Evelyn Waugh

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels. — Hallie Ephron

On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery. — S.D. Chrostowska

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. — Arthur Miller

Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place. — Janna Graber

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. — Virginia Woolf

[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Tessa reached for the words ... You know, in that essay of Donne's, what he says ... about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others. — Cassandra Clare

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. — Alain De Botton

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. — George Orwell

You think an essay should have a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points. You really do bore me. — Carole Maso

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. — Jason Najum

The point of the essay is to change things. — Edward Tufte

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

Henry David Thoreau is my favorite writer of all time, my literary god king, and his essay Wild Apples is my favorite thing to read. — Nicholas Trandahl

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim — Jason Najum

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair. — Virginia Woolf

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

Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible — Roger Rosenblatt

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton — W. H. Auden

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered. — Joel Salatin

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days. — Anne Carson

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot. — Chris Abani

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

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

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. — Meghan Daum