"Essayist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is commonly believed that such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, the opposite is true—he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct—to instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such careless ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... so much to think about that it desires not to be more encumbered than it can help. Such men as the late Lord Lytton, for example, are, in one respect, a nuisance to it. Bulwer was about equally distinguished as a novelist, as a dramatist, and as an essayist; and, ever since, the average man has been puzzled whether to think of him as the author of 'Pelham,' the author of 'The Lady of Lyons,' or the author of 'Caxtoniana.' Bulwer tried hard to establish a position as a poet, ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... with which they began to sputter at one another, on the supposition that each was mocking his neighbor. A short-hand writer, behind the scenes, was employed to take down the conversation, which, says the witty essayist, was easily done, inasmuch as one of the gentlemen was a quarter of an hour in saying "that the ducks and green peas were very good," and another almost an equal time in assenting to it. At the conclusion, however, the derided guests became ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Park on the west bank, is the home of John Burroughs, our sweetest essayist, the nineteenth century's "White of Selborne." Judge Barnard of Poughkeepsie, once said to the author of this handbook, "The best writer America has produced after Hawthorne is John Burroughs; I wish I could see him." It so happened that there had been an important ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... called heroisms which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
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