The Glorious American Essay Quotes

“I finished reading, not from the sweet, low pathos of the tale, but from the knowledge of the writer’s success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Edgar Allan Poe bristled at the canard that Americans were too materialistic and engineering-minded to produce literature: “Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make rail-roads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse…. But this is the purest insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him… nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation;”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Art, on the other hand, must be first of all “forceful.” The artist, in dealing with ethical revaluations (as he naturally would, since the characteristics of the century would be as fully represented in him as in a scientist or an inventor) had to make those conflicts explicit which the scientist could leave implicit.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do. Every one lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself, and that his schemes will not fail.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“And just as American democracy has been an ongoing experiment, with no guarantees of perfection, so has the essay been, as William Dean Howells argued, an innately democratic form inviting all comers to say their piece, however imperfectly.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and Associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, controul, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the Constituted authorities are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprizing minority of the Community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the Mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modefied by mutual interests. However combinations or Associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of “mankind,” but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary;”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Those who have been persecuted are, alas, all too often the persecutors of tomorrow.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“contentment, which is the last victory of justice,”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. “Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,” says the querulous farmer, “only holds the world together.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man will not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Marilynne Robinson defends the Puritans from what she regards as a caricature of their positions. Say what you will about their rigid morality: these Puritan thinkers were highly learned, with sophisticated prose styles, and we are fortunate in having them set so high an intellectual standard for later American essayists to follow.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present