The Best American Essays 2013 Quotes

“the evening crowd on University Avenue appeared to be living in an earlier American era, one lacking desperation, hysteria, and Fox News.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2013

“They try to make meaning of actual life, even if an awful lot has yet to be figured out. They grapple and reflect with seriousness and humor. They philosophize and confess with intellect and emotion. They recollect and reimagine private and public history with a combination of clarity and conjecture. They venture into what happened and why with a complicated collision of documented proof and impossible-to-pin-down remembrances. And they follow the answers to the questions that arise in the course of writing about what happened wherever they go. The essay’s engine is curiosity; its territory is the open road.”
― Cheryl Strayed, The Best American Essays 2013

“The word essay means “to try,” “to attempt,” “to test.” It’s what I was doing that day when I woke and sobbed in my bed and ended up hours later with an essay in my hands. Trying, attempting, and testing are what writers do in every form, of course—the making of literature is always an experiment—but I think those words convey something essential and particular about the art of the essay. Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known. A good essay isn’t a report of what happened. It’s a reach for the stuff beyond and beneath. Essayists begin with an objective truth and attempt to find a greater, grander truth by testing fact against subjective interpretations of experiences and ideas, memories and theories.”
― Cheryl Strayed, The Best American Essays 2013

“He was not a simple man and, consequently, a simple happiness was not in his nature, she concluded, but I did know him to have moments of simple pleasure and obvious joy.”
― Mako Yoshikawa, The Best American Essays 2013: Fine Writing and Thought-Provoking Essays Selected by Cheryl Strayed, Wild Author

“Orders make you stupid, the captain told me, figure it out for yourself.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2013