#essay

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#admire #american #american writer #essay #finished

To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat. ↗

— James Meade

#enjoying #essays #group #indeed #intellectual

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. ↗

— Patricia Hampl

#experience

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay. ↗

— Richard Rodriguez

#essay #life #private #public #richard-rodriguez

A bell cannot tell time, but it can be moved in just such a way as to say twelve o’clock – similarly, a man cannot calculate infinite numbers, but he can be moved in just such a way as to say pi. ↗

— Daniel Tammet

#maths #pi #science #science

Single guys can easily simulate some of the joys of marriage simply by installing one of those GPS devices that use a woman's voice. ↗

— Barry Parham

#humor #humor

Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗

— Lara Vapnyar

#brooklyn-was-mine #essays #memoirs #food

Must being in love always mean being in pain? ↗

— Alain de Botton

#love

[The cats] scamper in front of my legs, causing me to fall and face plant into whatever furniture is closest. They especially like to play this game when I’m carrying piping hot coffee. ↗

— Weston Locher

#comedy #essay #funny #humor #funny

After all, this was the place where I’d had my first meaningful conversation with a female, it was the site of a football’s first encounter with my groin, and above all, it was the location where I was first punched in the face by a bully. Somewhere out there, a tooth of mine lay deep within the soil. ↗

— Weston Locher

#comedy #essay #funny #humor #funny