Essayists From The United States

"The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here."

"I also love to travel, and am especially thrilled to see different tracts of wilderness that are still thriving on our planet. A lot of us spend our best efforts trying to reclaim what’s damaged, imagining and working to fend off the dire outcomes of humanity’s mistakes. To spend our hearts without filling them up again is a dangerous economy. So I go to the wilds to repair my soul. Earlier this year I spent several weeks in , a vast, unpeopled land where I walked trails among s, s, and s. I watched pumas eating guanacos. A wilderness big enough to support a healthy population of 200-pound predators: that is a wonder."

"Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed."

"A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars."

"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire."

"I have a personal theory that one reason Hemingway became so exasperated with him was that Daddy almost never got his name right."

"The real Scott is to be found in his notebooks and working papers, where he elaborated so patiently at turning the mess of his life to gold. "To observe one must be unwary," he wrote, so he took experience straight without a notebook. But he later hoarded it like a miser and pored over it like a monk illuminating a manuscript and produced enduring work. When a writer explores emotions to danger point like Scott, it is worse than philistine to talk about weakness of character. The whole moral test is in the books. The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are all the character reference a writer could want."

"I came across Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I used to hate S.F. and not even see he was good. I still dislike him but realize he could write..."

"Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing."

"I identified a lot with The Crackup as a high school student, and I wrote my college entrance exam on that book. I totally identified with it on the psychic level. He's trying to keep himself from cracking up, and I felt all kinds of schizophrenic things about being Chinese and being American."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

"He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes."

"F. Scott Fitzgerald, who collaborated with Budd Schulberg on the 1939 Winter Carnival, discovered that conversations with Hollywood Communists tended to be one-sided. "The important thing is that you should not argue with them," Fitzgerald wrote. "Whatever you say they have a way of twisting it into shapes which put you into some lower category of mankind, 'Fascist,' 'Liberal,' 'Trotskyist,' and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.""

"You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation — and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time."

"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

"Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art."

"How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."

"Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement."

"Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life."

"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell."

"My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness."

"That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich booy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she [his daughter Scottie] can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works."

"I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred."

"It takes a genius to whine appealingly."

"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. And it's these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now."

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

"It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.(From: The Freshest Boy)"

"His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.(From: A Diamond As Big as The Ritz)"

"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.' (From: The Offshore Pirate)"

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."

"Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores."

"I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking."

"I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future."

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true."

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."

"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."

"Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."

"Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

"In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life."

"'Look here, old sport, [...] what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves."

"Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot."

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material."