#essays

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#because #different #essays #i #interested

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please. "The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere. "I'm working on it. ↗

— Andrew Sullivan

#blogging #essays #humility #internet #media

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#essays #exception #i #interesting #me

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die. ↗

— Sharon Olds

#alcoholism #books #die #encouraging #essays

I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#am #classes #collected #day #essays

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.” — Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#essays #literature #quotes-to-live-by #change

As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid. ↗

— Aberjhani

#essays #global-community #philosophy #spirituality #w-e-b-du-bois

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her. ↗

— Junot Díaz

#essays #fiction #junot #literature #love

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

#change

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable. ↗

— Erwin Chargaff

#essays #language-literature #nature