Essay Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this. — Maureen Johnson

... 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

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

I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said) — C.S. Lewis

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. — William Deresiewicz

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

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered. — John Steinbeck

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

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

It's an essay that Sigmund Freud wrote about E.T.A. Hoffman's short story called "The Sandman" where someone mistakes an inanimate object for a living, breathing human being. And one of the things that Sigmund Freud really felt was that in modern life people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist there whatsoever. — DJ Spooky

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: That not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.
Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words. — Frederick Buechner

You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay. — Nora Ephron

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

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist. — Milan Kundera

Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

The house-cat is a four-legged quadruped, the legs as usual being at the corners. It is what is sometimes called a tame animal, though it feeds on mice and birds of prey. Its colours are striped, it does not bark, but breathes through its nose instead of its mouth. Cats also mow, which you all have heard. Cats have nine liveses, but which is seldom wanted in this country, coz' of Christianity. Cats eat meat and most anythink speshuelly where you can't afford. That is all about cats.
(From a schoolboy's essay, 1903.) — Helen Exley

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

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans. — Jane Hirshfield

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting
like cotton candy.'
'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said.
'Would it taste sweet?'
'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.'
Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away.
Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000). — Timothy Ferris

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

After all, this was the place where I'd had my first meaningful conversation with a female, it was the site of a football's first encounter with my groin, and above all, it was the location where I was first punched in the face by a bully. Somewhere out there, a tooth of mine lay deep within the soil. — Wes Locher

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's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live - ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I'm writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn't get the heroic death. She survives - and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones she loves are gone. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in. — Dorianne Laux

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

I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Locke's essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal today seem to have little understanding of what this virtue really is. Toleration does not mean renouncing all opinions that others might find offensive. It does not mean an easy-going relativism or a belief that 'anything goes'. On the contrary, it means accepting the right of others to think and act in ways of which you disapprove. It means being prepared to protect people from negative discrimination even when you hate what they think and what they feel. But — Roger Scruton

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism - that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture" - was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other — John Howard Griffin

You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video. — Biz Stone

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

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to — Jason Najum

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured. — Anne Fadiman

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

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel. — Isaac Deutscher

[The cats] scamper in front of my legs, causing me to fall and face plant into whatever furniture is closest. They especially like to play this game when I'm carrying piping hot coffee. — Wes Locher

Oh Beck, I love reading your e-mail. Learning your life. And I am careful; I always mark new messages unread so that you won't get alarmed. My good fortune doesn't stop there; You prefer e-mail. You don't like texting. So this means that I am not missing out on all that much communication. You wrote an "essay" for some blog in which you stated that "e-mails last forever. You can search for any word at any time and see everything you ever said to anyone about that one word. Texts go away." I love you for wanting a record. I love your records for being so accessible and I'm so full of you, your calendar of caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don't publish, your recipes and exercises. You will know me soon too, I promise. — Caroline Kepnes

Wake not the Dead: - they bring but gloomy night
And cheerless desolation into day
For in the grave who mouldering lay,
No more can feel the influence of light,
Or yield them to the sun's prolific might;
Let them repose within their house of clay -
Corruption, wilt thou vainly e'er essay
To quicken: - it sends forth a prest'lent blight;
And neither fiery sun, nor bathing dew,
Nor breath of Spring the dead can e'er renew.
That which from life is pluck'd, becomes the foe
Of life, and whoso wakes it waketh woe.
Seek not the dead to waken from that sleep
In which from mortal eye they lie enshrouded deep. — Ludwig Tieck

And in his third essay Herodius (not Herodotus, a mistaken pronunciation, perhaps) said 'We can contend with the evil that men do in the name of evil, but heaven protect us from what they do in the name of good.' — Richard Boone

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Harry moved the tip of his eagle-feather quill down the page, frowning as he looked for something that would help him write his essay, Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss. — J.K. Rowling

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about "people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet." Intending to parody society's obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: "I don't think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error. — Danah Boyd

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

One time, I was given an essay topic: to describe a perfect horse, whom the mere sight of the rider's whip would make obedient. I depicted this perfect horse throwing his rider at the sight of the whip. — Marquis De Lafayette

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time — George Orwell

They are a great essay in male friendship, which has gone now. Men's friendship has been debased. One of the lovely things about Holmes and Watson is that they do have this great platonic relationship. — Jeremy Brett

Life is nothing more than a clean sheet of paper that most people use to write a dictation on, whereas only a select few ever use it to write their own essay. — Christopher Mart

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

When Putin was preparing to take back the presidency in Moscow, he published an essay in the fall of 2011 in a Russian newspaper announcing plans to regain lost influence among former Soviet republics and create "a powerful supra-national union capable of becoming a pole in the modern world." Putin said that this new Eurasian Union would "change the geopolitical and geo-economic configuration of the entire continent." Some dismissed these words as campaign bluster, but I thought they revealed Putin's true agenda, which was effectively to "re-Sovietize" Russia's periphery. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties. — Benjamin Franklin

When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay. — Cassie Nichols

What is more, as J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us in his great essay on Beowulf, there is a danger that attends rational and scientific description: "a plain pure fairy story dragon" can be ruined at the hands of a logical analysis. The interpreter, "unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. — Gregory Alan Thornbury

Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war - except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war - short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide - is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong - wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. — Susan Sontag

I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say. — Vikram Seth

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

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

We should scarcely be excused in concluding this essay without calling the reader's attention to the beneficent and wise laws established by the author of nature to provide for the various exigencies of the sublunary creation, and to make the several parts dependent upon each other, so as to form one well-regulated system or whole. — John Dalton

Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."
That was all.
And that was everything. — Jack Canfield

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

In his essay 'Self-Reliance' Emerson wrote, 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.' The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a a nonconformist. Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave. — Martin Luther King Jr.

All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book. — Rick Riordan

For TV you also get those pre-interviews when researchers ask you what you're going to say. The pre-interview drives me insane. If they've already decided the outcome, why don't I just hand in an essay? Maybe if we talk we'll find something out. I'd rather just have an awkward pause. — Jarvis Cocker

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

the best of luck in improving their English writing skills. However, in saying that, it's not up to luck so much as dedication, hard work, and a personal interest in improving your English academic writing skills. APPLY your newly learned knowledge with practical essay writing skills, and you can write you way to a BA. — Stephen E. Dew

I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write. — Dan Millman

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

The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions. — Patrick Rothfuss

Judy Collins sings about in "The Blizzard," or read Alice Walker's essay "My Father's Country Is the Poor." Each — Gloria Steinem

Indeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses. — Jean-Luc Marion

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

He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser, and for a long time you will wonder what happened and what you did wrong. And if another of his kind comes knocking on your door, will you open it?

-From an essay signed "A psychopath in prison — Robert D. Hare

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there. — James Ellroy

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

It has been the will of Heaven," the essay began, "that we should be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live ...
a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose. How few of the human race have ever had the opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate? — David McCullough

One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about. — Thomas Mallon

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them. — Robert James Waller

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

Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers. — Fareed Zakaria

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

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

Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines. — Stephen Vincent Benet

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

In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture. — Henry Kissinger

In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. — Alfie Kohn

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

That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. — Paul Auster

Don't be an idiot - Idiots repeat as for my opinion to repeat is a useless process better check out one book it's not possible to learn everything and use everything it's insane. But you can do one thing, focus on the important stuff which have impressed you, use them - delete the book, make an essay and think on this few days you can think and check out some other books, videos and so on and so on... If you didn't get it, okay then listen again until you get it... It's imporntant to don't repeat and to understand it! — Deyth Banger

Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on 'the souls of beasts', and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need. — John N. Gray

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

Okay, write that down," Hermoine said to Ron, pushing his essay and a sheet covered in her own writing back to Ron, "and then copy out this conclusion that I've written for you."
"Hermoine, you are honestly the most wonderful person I've ever met," said Ron weakly, "and if I'm ever rude to you again
"
"
I'll know you're back to normal," said Hermoine. — J.K. Rowling

The Man Who Ate Everything features a particularly good essay on salt, finding that it's only harmful to around 8% of the world's population. This should be mentioned whenever someone does that annoying health-kick thing of declaring, 'Oh, we never salt our food now.' Consider it revenge for the tasteless gruel they've just made you eat. HESTON — Neil Davey

Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was. — Dan Savage

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

Do you know what every instructor in the world wants from you? He or she really, really wants you to do two things: Demonstrate that you have understood the course material and write intelligently about your subject. — Scribendi

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay
the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework. — Walt Whitman

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. — Donna Tartt

Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem. — Vijay Seshadri

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