Quotations About the Personal Essay

Of all forms of lit­er­at­ure, however, the es­say is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The prin­ciple which con­trols it is simply that it should give pleas­ure; the de­sire that im­pels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to re­ceive pleas­ure. Everything in an es­say must be sub­dued to that end. It should lay us un­der a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, re­freshed, with its last. In the in­ter­val we may pass through the most vari­ous ex­per­i­ences of amuse­ment, sur­prise, in­terest, in­dig­na­tion; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wis­dom with Ba­con, but we must nev­er be roused. The es­say must lap us about and draw its cur­tain across the world.

… A nov­el has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can the es­say­ist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an in­tens­i­fic­a­tion of life – a bask­ing, with every fac­ulty alert, in the sun of pleas­ure? He must know – that is the first es­sen­tial – how to write.

Virginia Woolf
“The Modern Essay”

The fa­mil­i­ar es­say­ist [in the genre’s hey­day] didn’t speak to the mil­lions; he spoke to one read­er, as if the two of them were sit­ting side by side in front of the crack­ling fire with their cravats loosened, their fa­vor­ite stim­u­lants at hand, and a long even­ing of con­ver­sa­tion stretch­ing be­fore them. His view­point was sub­ject­ive, his frame of ref­er­ence con­crete, his style di­gress­ive, his ec­cent­ri­cit­ies con­spicu­ous, and his laughter usu­ally at his own ex­pense.

Anne Fadiman
“Preface” to At Large and at Small

I set forth a humble and un­pol­ished life, which is really one and the same. One can tie up all mor­al philo­sophy with an or­din­ary and private life just as eas­ily as with a life of rich­er stuff: each per­son bears the en­tire form of the hu­man con­di­tion.

Michel de Montaigne
“Of repentance”

As it maps the ter­rit­ory of the self, the es­say de­tails the par­tic­u­lars of every­day life, at­tuned, like Wordsworth and like Dutch genre paint­ing, to the quite mundane and quo­tidi­an: tak­ing a walk, mow­ing a field, ob­serving a moth dy­ing, con­tem­plat­ing a piece of chalk. The won­der is not that art can be made of such or­din­ary stuff, but that we should ex­pect it to be found any­where else.

G. Douglas Atkins
Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

Everything I see or hear is an es­say in bud. The world is every­where whis­per­ing es­says, and one need only be the world’s amanu­en­sis.

Alexander Smith
“Of the writing of essays”

I am not here [as I es­say about my­self] erect­ing a statue for the town cross­roads, a church, or a pub­lic square:

I do not strive for a pompous page of inflated triffles.
…We speak alone. (perseus)

This is for a lib­rary corner and the amuse­ment of a neigh­bor, a re­l­at­ive, or a friend, who may take pleas­ure in be­ing reac­quain­ted and con­vers­ing anew with me in this im­age. Oth­ers have taken heart to speak of them­selves be­cause they found the sub­ject worthy and rich; I, on the con­trary, be­cause I have found mine so point­less and so mea­ger that no one could sus­pect me of os­ten­ta­tion.

Michel de Montaigne
“Of giving the lie”

Para­dox­ic­ally enough, the shrink­age in size [of the es­say to a column in a magazine or news­pa­per] has brought about a cor­res­pond­ing ex­pan­sion of in­di­vidu­al­ity. We have no longer the “I” of Max and Lamb, but the “we” of pub­lic bod­ies and oth­er sub­lime per­son­ages. It is “we” who go to hear the Ma­gic Flute; “we” who ought to profit by it; “we,” in some mys­ter­i­ous way, who, in our cor­por­ate ca­pa­city, once upon a time ac­tu­ally wrote it. … But while “we” are grat­i­fied, “I,” that un­ruly part­ner in the hu­man fel­low­ship, is re­duced to des­pair. “I” must al­ways think things for him­self, and feel things for him­self. To share them in a di­luted form with the ma­jor­ity of well-edu­cated and well-in­ten­tioned men and wo­men is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen in­tently and profit pro­foundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and re­joices in a single blade of grass or a sol­it­ary potato.

Virginia Woolf
“The Modern Essay”

On style de­pends the suc­cess of the es­say­ist. Mon­taigne said the most fa­mil­i­ar things in the finest way. Gold­smith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weath­er, the shower bright­ens the dusty shrub­bery of a sub­urb­an villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with us­age it should, like cur­rent coin, be called in, and, from the mint of geni­us, re­is­sued fresh and new.

Alexander Smith
“Of the writing of essays”

At the core of the per­son­al es­say is the sup­pos­i­tion that there is a cer­tain unity to hu­man ex­per­i­ence. As Michel de Mon­taigne, the great in­nov­at­or and pat­ron saint of the per­son­al es­say­ists, put it, “Every man has with­in him­self the en­tire hu­man con­di­tion.” This meant that when he was telling about him­self, he was talk­ing, to some de­gree, about all of us. The per­son­al es­say has an im­pli­citly demo­crat­ic bent, in the value it places on ex­per­i­ence rather than status dis­tinc­tions. “And on the lofti­est throne in the world we are still sit­ting only on our own rump,” wrote Mon­taigne.

Phillip Lopate
The Art of the Personal Essay

The charm of the personal essay
 

Resources on the personal essay