August 24th, 2006 | Published in Writing, Quotes
The secret of writing a good essay is to let oneself go….
—J.B. Priestly, quoted in “Introduction” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. xlviii
August 23rd, 2006 | Published in Region, Community, Ecology, Agrarianism, Quotes
Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.
–Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67
August 22nd, 2006 | Published in Marketing and Advertising, Consumerism, Quotes, Culture
One way to make a book a best seller is to call it one.
–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 165
August 21st, 2006 | Published in Life, Writing, Quotes
While young people excel at lyrical poetry and mathematics, it is hard to think of anyone who made a mark on the personal essay form in his or her youth…. It is difficult to write analytically from the middle of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out.
—Phillip Lopate, “Introduction” in The Art of the Personal Essay (1994), p. xxvii
August 20th, 2006 | Published in Current Events, Politics
Should polygamy be illegal? Is it the government’s place to forbid it?
I don’t think so. Just because it is a bad idea doesn’t mean it should be illegal. What do you think?
August 19th, 2006 | Published in Consumerism, Books & Reading, Education, Quotes, Culture
Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance.
–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 133
August 18th, 2006 | Published in Consumerism, Television, Quotes, Technology
[Television] is the medium that almost perfectly expresses the high-tech society: simplistic and forceful, capable of no complexity of thought whatsoever, designed for limited and graphic impacts (best if short and violent, like football and commercials), and sending pulses continually at that psychological nexus that Freud, doctor for the consumer society, called the “pleasure principle,” where desires, always created, are always insatiable.
–Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future (1995), p. 217
August 17th, 2006 | Published in Writing, Quotes
The novice essayist often errs by taking a strong moralistic stand and running it into the ground, with nowhere to go after two paragraphs…. The enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness, not just because it is tiresome and ugly in itself, but because it slows down the dialectic of self-questioning.
—Phillip Lopate, “Introduction” in The Art of the Personal Essay (1994), p. xxx