#essay

The first way not to shake hands is executed by receiving someone’s hand in yours and proceeding to squeeze it tightly, hurting the other party as if they were responsible for a past death in your family, or your adoption as a child. ↗

— Weston Locher

#comedy #essay #funny #humor #death

Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#humility #montaigne #freedom

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college. ↗

— Tony Hillerman

#arts #back #bank #bank robbery #being

I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by he admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this? ↗

— William Gibson

#age

What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else. ↗

— Leonard Nimoy

#area #come #curious #else #essay

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards. ↗

— Galen Rowell

#dozen #editor #editors #essay #geographic

Music resembles poetry, in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master hand alone can reach. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#an-essay-on-criticism #art #genius #music #poet

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man. ↗

— Pico Iyer

#travel-essays #faith

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#transcendentalism #courage

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#essays #humor #inspirational #nature-writing #weasels