Quotes on Essayists

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.