{"quotes":[{"text":"Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["essays","feminism"],"id":8264,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"I don't understand how I can always want to sleep, hate waking up, and yet be afraid of death.","author":"Mike Heil","tags":["essays","family","humor"],"id":8349,"author_id":"Mike+Heil"},{"text":"Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.","author":"Kilroy J. Oldster","tags":["essayist","essays","memoir","memoir-writing","memoirs","personal-story","self-awareness","self-discovery","self-discovery","self-realization","stories","stories-from-the-heart","stories-of-people","story-of-a-soul","story-of-life","story-of-my-life","story-of-your-life","story-telling","storytellers","storytelling","writers-on-thinking","writers-on-writing","writers","writing-philosophy","writing-process"],"id":9483,"author_id":"Kilroy+J.+Oldster"},{"text":"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.","author":"Anatole Broyard","tags":["a-passion-for-books","essays","literature","to-live-by"],"id":10636,"author_id":"Anatole+Broyard"},{"text":"REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.","author":"Francis Bacon","tags":["accurate","essays","poetic","revenge"],"id":22764,"author_id":"Francis+Bacon"},{"text":"The womb of the world births us. My filth comes from the same earthwork that gives rise to all stories. My interior light connects me with all the other creatures that inhabit this world of rocks, air, grass, woods, and water. My genetic code links me inextricably with all of nature. I enter the medley in the river of life with the ability to respond as life unfolds before my childlike eyes. My homemade medicinal poultice might not be of any benefit to other people. Nonetheless, we should each write our stories because each of us aims to attain a greater degree of awareness of our own authenticity. We owe a moral obligation to our family, friends, and ourselves as well as to the community to make a determined effort to wring the most out of life. We must applaud all efforts to investigate the human condition. Even if my writing amounts to nothing more than a clumsy attempt to travel the same tracks other people burnished with much more insight, clarity, precision, and style, it is an act of self-definition to ascribe to any philosophy. Philosophy represents a living charter; it is a life of action.","author":"Kilroy J. Oldster","tags":["autobiography","essay-writing","essayist","essays","memoir","memoir-writing","memories","personal-essay","personal-essays","philosophy","philosophy-of-life","philosophy","writers-on-thinking","writers-on-writing","writing"],"id":35999,"author_id":"Kilroy+J.+Oldster"},{"text":"A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.","author":"Susan Sontag","tags":["cultural-studies","essays","photography","quotes"],"id":53276,"author_id":"Susan+Sontag"},{"text":"The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their 'product' not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their 'success' something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.","author":"Mark Slouka","tags":["essays","humanities","humanity","life","truth"],"id":58811,"author_id":"Mark+Slouka"},{"text":"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["articles","hip","book-reviews","books","collaboration","essays","readers","writers","writing"],"id":72055,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the peopleare right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.","author":"E.B. White","tags":["1943","democracy","essays","new-yorker","war-board"],"id":73155,"author_id":"E.B.+White"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}