essayists-from-the-united-states

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian—where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn't—towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place—now that it is dead—had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

"Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter."

"For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home, or abroad, as the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them. After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks."

"It was a Native Son who, when asked by an Englishman, visiting the United States for the first time, to name the Seven Wonders of America, replied: "Santa Barbara, Coronado, Del Monte, San Francisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and Mount Shasta.""But," objected the visitor, "all those places are in California, aren't they?""Of course they're in California!" cried the Native Son. "Where else would they be?""

"Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent—call it what you like—throw the dictionary at it!"

"This, in a way, would be exceeding odd And almost justify man’s ways to God— If, by the healing of these hills, the blind Receive an inner sight, and leave behind Their narrow greed, their numbing fears, and fare Forth with new souls to breathe the honest air;If rich man, poor man, lawyer, merchant, thief Declare with one accord that they'd as lief Laugh and forget, and make a gracious truce With sea and mountain; learn again the use Of earth and sky and ocean-ranging breeze, And dance, and dance beneath the pepper trees."

"Less jowly now thanks to crappy jailhouse cooking—his country-boy haircut and jaunty hunting cap retired for a CEO’s side part—Chapo looked surprisingly guapo in a business suit. (And at 5’ 6”, not nearly as diminutive as his nickname Chapo—“Shorty”—would imply.) U.S. Marshals would knot his necktie just before he entered the room because mirrors can be smashed and weaponized. A former secretary observed in court he’d never seen Chapo in a suit. Early in the trial, Chapo would absently tug at his collar. Months in, he’d grown accustomed to the yoke."

"Does Chapo speak in tongues? “I think he has,” [Chapo’s sister] Bernarda told me. By all accounts, he has spent many hours in this church. There’s been some signature Pentecostal healing-hand work, too. “Many brothers who are pastors have laid hands on him and prayed for him, and with a contrite heart, that’s when he cries.”"

"Prison’s been hard on Harvey [Weinstein] …He’s now living as his assistants once did, in the clutches of a perverse and petty system, overseen by guards who demand utter obeisance, deference, and subjection. Imagine one of the world’s foremost consumers of the luxury-hotel suite and capacious bathroom trying to survive an infirmary dormitory with no-seat toilets. In court, his people had to shut off his iPhone for him; he’d never quite mastered the mechanics. But now there’s no phone—save the one he’s allowed to access for only an hour a day as, maintaining his innocence, he orchestrates his appeal from a room he can use only when no one’s there."

"People in La Tuna miss Chapo, the town’s greatest, wiliest patrón. The young women debate whether he’s finally lost his looks, having only late-period pale-and-doughy mug shots to go by. (Avoiding stepping outside where one might be seen and subsisting on takeout tacos takes a toll on the body.)"

"And though she has a bad back from the competitive skiing that proved her lift ticket out of Communist Czechoslovakia, Ivana [Trump] is on her way to Aspen for the holidays—and St. Moritz after that. "I can ski backwards on one ski. And foldblinded!" she exults. "But I don't go through moguls very often." This could be an apt metaphor for her love life: She recently announced that after four months of marriage, she'd filed for separation from her fourth husband, Rossano Rubicondi, an actor-slash-model-slash-arm-charm 23 years her junior."

"“I asked Chapo why he had to kill people,” recalled one former lieutenant on the [witness] stand. “And he said, “either your mom’s going to cry or their mom’s going to cry.""

"Lately, friends imagine they hear Donald [Trump]'s intonations in Ivanka's surprisingly sexy voice, a voice that sounds like she gargles with Cristal. The inane locutions of her generation — those "like"s and "you know"s — have been almost banished from conversation in favor of the more lawyerly "if you will" and other such Donald-like tropes….Ivanka could tell you about the Putzmeister pump throwing concrete a thousand vertical feet atop what stands to be the tallest residential building in the world, a site she's currently supervising in Chicago and one of 33 construction sites all over the globe. Instead, she is in the living room of her Park Avenue pad, pointing out the subtle architecture of some earrings."

"When it comes to siblings, Hollywood has a quirky history of power brothers, from such behind-the-desk deal-makers as the Warners, the Cohns, and the Selznicks to forces behind the camera: the Coens, the Safdies, the Sylberts, and the Russos. And then there’s Harvey and Bob Weinstein."

"Mr. Weiner grabbed for a pair of spectacles that looked a little like [his mentor] Chuck Schumer’s. These were his driving glasses—even when he wasn’t driving. His press secretary seemed nervous about what Mr. Weiner might say in the car: Mr. Weiner is the of back-seat drivers…“My problem is, I generally know how to get there,” Mr. Weiner explained. “It’s part of the ethos of living in New York—figuring out how to do things in a better way.”"

"The hair, an elegant patisserie swirl of butter cream, is as remarkable as the gingerbread slab riding the head of 's equally celebrated ex-husband. Never look a day over 28, famously admonished his then-wife. She recalls this, adding ruefully, "It's going to cost me a fortune.”"

"Mr. Weiner likes to describe the Mayor as a weak sister, rolling over for the Republicans when he’s not kissing up with donations. Whenever he sees the Mayor, Mr. Weiner said, it’s all reasonably cordial. After all, nothing’s personal in politics. “I think he likes me,” Mr. Weiner ventured. (The Mayor does not, say his aides.)"

"Last year, Donald [Trump] (married to ex-model Melania Knauss and father of a baby boy named Barron) announced on The View that if he weren't Ivanka's father, maybe he'd be dating her. "I think it's the human condition to be frequently embarrassed by your parents," Ivanka says, generally speaking."

""I wear black all the time," Ivana notes."

"The Hollywood Reporter had published an article about [witness for the prosecution] Kaja Sokola with the headline "Anonymous No More: Inside the Complicated Life of Harvey Weinstein’s Key Accuser." Mr. Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, spotted the writer, Phoebe Eaton, in the courtroom and approached to provide Mr. Weinstein’s take on it: "He said it was fantastic." "I’m not out to please him," she said. "OK, I’ll just ignore you in the courtroom," Mr. Engelmayer said, before heading out to the hallway and toward the elevator."

"At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals—involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood."

"Phoebe Eaton's New York Magazine look at the blue-collar vs. the blue blood Senate GOP primary in New York provides some excellent insight into John Spencer and KT McFarland and indicates the Clinton campaign may need to rent extra office space simply for the oppo research. However, it is a letter that McFarland wrote to her parents years ago that has garnered the most attention: "Shortly after she discovered [her brother] Mike had AIDS, she wrote her parents lengthy, angry, almost Gothic letters in which she outed her brother, blamed her father for his troubles as well as those of her and her other siblings, and cut off contact with her parents. 'Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?' she wrote. 'He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.' The father's behavior had surfaced for McFarland as recovered memory. She said a shrink put her up to writing the letter; reached for comment, her mother, Edith Troia -- KT has since made up with her parents -- denied the account. 'Wouldn't that make a great book?' she said. 'Please be kind. You could be casting dark shadows on this whole race.'" Unanswered: where did Eaton get the letters [and] will [K.T. McFarland’s political consultant] Ed Rollins keep talking to the press (or, at least, to Eaton)…?"

"When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels."

"Nobody heard her tears; the heart is a fountain of weeping water which makes no noise in the world."

"Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Thaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chesnut, Maple and Elm Streets."

"What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore."

"Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male."

"The greater part of your misogamy is venal; the other cause of your invective humbug is that you're a muggish homuncle who couldn't raise a flickering ember in a vagabond-laced mutton."

"Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk—but all these are "thoughts of the visions of the night.""

"Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice."

"There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment."

"When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah."

"The - manner of looking at nature according to the principles of painterly composition is symbolized by a device known as a . Reputedly invented as an aid by the painter , it was a convex, dark-toned glass that reflected landscapes in miniature, with "" tints and merging detail. It was popular with s and gentlemen travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and was still used in the first half of the nineteenth century."

"My personal emotional response to , like that of so many others, is sensory—stretching out on a large sun-warmed rock outcrop, watching players and picnickers on the , seeing a great production of The Tempest in the in the gloaming of a summer evening, a flash of red from the plumage of a on a spring day in , walking barefoot on the grass of the , the memory of on the frozen on New Year's Day 1981, listening to the moody sound from a saxophone being played beneath the one of the park's reverberating stone arches ... I could go on."

"During the summer of 1966 and in subsequent years, operated as the venue for rock 'n' roll, jazz, , pop, and concerts sponsored by . Overlooking the objections of his recently appointed Central Park curator, , played on the public's justifiable fear that the park had become unsafe at night: "It's my responsibility to make it so exciting that people will come there in droves, and that also is protection." He did not foresee the event to which his "attractions to draw teenagers" would stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in the park, nor the effect this would have on the park's landscape and future safety."

"faced the challenge of converting what was still a ragged 843-acre wasteland into a pleasure ground that is a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence, while my task was not to build such an extraordinary civic amenity but to develop a plan and find the means to rescue this underappreciated, wholly original tour de force from further destruction—a less remarkable but nevertheless important feat."

"In this magnum opus, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the and a longtime administrator of that celebrated oasis, stakes out and cultivates a breathtakingly vast terrain: the history of man-made landscape from to the present. Though Rogers focuses on a number of well-known gardens and parks — from of A.D. 118-38 outside Rome to Antonio Gaudí's of 1900-14 in Barcelona — her subject is less than the social interaction of various cultures with their natural settings. Encompassing as much as , this panoramic study is impressive not only for its encyclopedic scope but also for the author's authoritative command of so much diverse material and for her lucid writing."

"The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth."

"Society is too often at war with love. Thousands of human spirits created to assimilate, to afford mutual comfort and inspiration, to interpret each other, and find in sympathy a balm and motive that will render them superior to vicissitude; thousands of human spirits cross and recross each other's paths, severed by the barriers of vain custom and arbitrary opinion."

"It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament."

"If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words."

"This miserable habit of our times is vividly illustrated by the manner in which those next most sacred things to mortals, books, are treated."

"There are no greater forgers in the universe, than cunning mannerists. Their whole lives are false. The loveliest of human attributes, the beautiful, the winning virtue of sincerity, abides not with them. They have abjured the profession of humanity."

"We discern beyond the smile and the honeyed word, and are sickened at the self-created hollowness of a human heart."

"Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency."

"A popular epithet usually goes nearer the truth than we are apt to imagine."

"If the perspective of time were not a necessary condition of romance, the present age would be deemed as fertile in the wonderful as any which have preceded it; but this obvious truth, though sometimes acknowledged, is seldom realized."

"Humor is doubtless intended as the safety-valve of concentrative minds, and its prevalence, in the English race, is owing to their reserve of character, which finds no vent through a mercurial temperament like the French and Italians."

"Tact is an essential principle of conversation; hence, the eastern metaphor which likens a word spoken in season, to "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The time and the society must regulate the subject."

"It has been often remarked that earnest men excel in humor, and we perceive how benign is the law which thus tempers elements of fearful intensity."