Essayists From The United States

"I’d joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off."

"Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detest."

"It was that rarity, an easy decision."

"He allowed himself to feel that his stubbornness was courage. Maybe it was."

"He’s just a classic scapegoat, told people things they didn’t want to hear. There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time."

"Everett realized what was wrong with the scene. L.A. was built for cars, and without them it was bereft, a body drained of blood. Or a hive itself, only emptied. A husk."

"“That’s the way it has to be for you. You’ll always be living in an FSR.” “FSR?” “Finite Subjective Reality. That’s what I call it. I ought to copyright that, in fact. You go creating a little area of control around you, until you bump into the next guy with his. A little sphere of reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, whatever you pull together. There’s no hope of sorting it out. That’s the way you live. FSR.”"

"People believe what they need to believe."

"Journeyman himself had a kind of tone deafness when it came to Eastern stuff, or at least to the Eastern stuff spouted by Westerners who fancied themselves enlightened."

"Give it up, Chaos. Sane and real only go so far these days."

"This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think."

"“OK, so he’s a producer, right?” Lucius spoke as a prosecuting attorney, nailing down established facts. “The thing about producers is that they are producing something, usually several things at once.” “He’s a liar,” said Jane. “Same thing,” said Lucius."

"Things changed, he thought. Then they didn’t. And we forgot they could again."

"What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort."

"Driving down child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human achievement, at least for pediatricians and parents."

"Advice ought to be all about the patient, and that means, I know, that I shouldn't withhold good advice even in situations where I haven't been able to follow it myself. My patients are entitled to my knowledge and understanding rather than my backsliding—to my strengths, shall we say, rather than my weaknesses."

"For many practicing pediatricians, the imperative keeps coming back to the exam room. Recently, in the pediatric outpatient clinic at Bellevue Hospital, which has served the poor of New York City since 1736, I saw a toddler who was seriously overweight, and I tried to talk with his mother about ending the practice of nighttime milk bottles. The mother became very distressed when I broached the subject of the child’s weight, and the risk of severe dental caries. She knew it all — she had already been through dental procedures for her son, she was worried about the family history of diabetes and the risks associated with obesity. But if she didn’t give her son a milk bottle, he would cry — loudly and at length — and his crying at night disturbed the other people sharing the apartment, who all had to get up early for work or school. She was clearly worried that following my advice might mean losing her living situation, which was already tenuous. The toddler in my exam room was already suffering from some of the chronic diseases — obesity, dental caries — that are part of the medical risk of poverty."

"Change can come slowly in medical practice—unless of course it comes in a sudden and absolute flurry of discovery, evidence-based recommendations, and new standards of care. But the kind of change that is based on consensus, on slowly dawning realization, or just on revamping ingrained habits can be slow indeed—it has not proved easy, for example, or even doable, to get physicians to expand our role by screening regularly and consistently for maternal depression, home firearm safety, or domestic violence."

"When I write about medicine, I write about patients, always trying to pin down the complicated pieces of other people's lives that go spinning past me. As a resident, exhausted beyond belief, I would come home and sit down and write the story of a surprising patient encounter, a hospital moment that I felt I would never forget. A month or two later I would look at the reference and the child would have slipped my mind completely, displaced by the parade of children and families and conversatioins and exam-room encounters and unfolding medical histories."

"The safest way to transport a sick newborn, so hospital wisdom goes, is when it is still inside its mothers."

"During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. But for them, the truth was dangerous. By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk -- of persecution, of heartbreak. When you're not allowed to express anything in the open, you become good at reading what is unspoken."

"I run into these “good Catholics” all the time, for example, who would rather die than cast their lot with the rest of humanity and ask for help with their massive psycho-spiritual wounds around family, love, addictions, finances. “We have Christ,” you can hear them thinking. Well, yes, and Christ works through other people. We have a huge fear of appearing vulnerable or weak, of not having all the answers. That is what Christ and the Gospels are for."

"I have many times sat across from, and told some of my darkest secrets to, gay ex-methheads, convicted felons, functional illiterates, and all sorts of other unpromising folks like myself, to truly great effect. I have become friends with many of these people; they have been deeply loyal and generous friends to me. But I’m not going to kneel before that person. That I want to kneel; that I want, with a humble and contrite heart, to be forgiven, to be made clean, to be born anew; that the Church is built, in a sense, upon that very desire, makes me know that my house is built on solid rock. I continue to fail and fall, but my house is built on solid rock."

"Maybe it’s because I’m a convert. I would not be dissuaded from Christ and His Church by any of the stuff that’s gone on. Yeah, the Church is human. The Church is made up of very human people. So yeah, the “scandals” don’t, you know, the sorrow of all sin and loneliness and using each other as objects and all that, of course, is always a source of deep concern, but again, if I’m really concerned about that, how can I conduct my own life? How can I purify my own heart?"

"I love the poet Kwame Dawes, and I always come back to this quote of his: “We are political by our noise and by our silence.” What we choose to be excited about is political. For the longest time, I’d kind of cringe, thinking I’m not bold enough to be political. His words really helped me own the power of my own enthusiasm. Think of how many things weren’t championed by the publishing world in the ’80s and ’90s. Think of how many things weren’t even encouraged. It’s not that there weren’t Asian Americans writing literature or writing about nature. The publishing houses chose not to publish them. That’s a political statement, too….So for anybody who says, Oh, I don’t want to get too political here—we’re all political. You’re political by what you champion and what you stay quiet about."

"… I still think of that 8-year-old girl who loved sitting on the floor of her library, reading about animals and plants. How excited I was to read new nature books. Every time, turn to the back cover, and it was always a White guy. I never saw someone like me. I might have started thinking, maybe outdoors is not for me [if it wasn’t for] my parents, who showed me what it means to have a garden and how much fun it was to memorize the constellations. So it was weird, because I was internalizing what I saw as a lover of pop culture, but what my parents modeled was different…"

"Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who uses poetry to write of the wonders of the natural world. She writes about being brown in white America, about being a daughter, a wife, a mother, of being a woman making sense of her own skin."

"One thing I discovered, when I was doing reading for this [collection], is that one of the roots of the word wonder means to smile. Wonder is wanting to know more about others, with a smile. It’s that joy. And I don’t know if this sounds Pollyannaish, but you don’t have to teach a kid to wonder…"

"…It was very purposeful that I included animals that I’ve never touched, never looked into their eyes. We should be able to care for creatures outside of [our immediate vicinity]. We should be able to care about plants and animals and people that we’ve never seen before."

"He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. "This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo—and I'm telling you this as a friend, now. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn't work—doesn't work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. She thinks this is Camelot or something, your childhood. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up 'idyllic' in the dictionary and I wouldn't hold my breath. I wouldn't lie in bed all day just waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along.""

"Sometimes I don't know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I don't know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way."

"You know what Christmas means? It means if I love you, I'm going to buy you a whole load of crap. The more I love you, the bigger the load gets. Sometimes, if you can afford it, you can get your loved one literally tons of crap, and then they're really loved. Love, love, love. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. Buy some more crap. Come on, line up and buy yourselves a whole lot more crap. Here's something nice. Bought any crap quite like this crap recently? Crap crap crap. Ho ho ho. Like that mechanical Santa Claus in the Montgomery Ward's window display. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, everybody. Have yourselves all one fucking hell of a merry little Christmas, all you poor stupid saps. Line up and get taken, that's what I say, that's what Santa says. We take MasterCard cards and Visa cards. Come on, losers. Line up on this side. Get your money taken on that side."

"I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody else's role. My mind might be a stage upon which some cultural drama played."

"The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much."

"Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies."

"A poet fascinated with border states between existence and nonexistence."

"(You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living.) Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me."

"She was in my poetry seminar at Columbia and I felt that then her poetry was tremendously involved with a kind of female anger but also victimization which I think is something that really has to come out in poetry, but it's not primarily what I would hope to find in women's poems in the future. I'd like to find something much more complicated and dense. But I think there's going to be a lot of that anger in poetry and some of it will be very powerful poetry."

"One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing."

"(You once said to me on the phone, “Follow your enthusiasms.”) I believe that. I used to be approached in classes by women who felt they shouldn’t have children because children were too distracting, or would eat up the vital energies from which art comes. But you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again."

"There is something "disembodied, triumphant, dead"—Whitman's words—about Glück's usual voice [...]. She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope, transparently removed in space or time."

"My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there."

"When I’m trying to put a poem or a book together, I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it."

"I’m an opportunist—I always hope I’ll get material out of any activity. I never know where writing is going to come from"

"Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes."

"Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth."

"I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joyin the raw wind of the new world."

"I caution you as I was never cautioned you will never let go, you will never be satiated."

"We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory."

"The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see."