The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

Like everyone, I want my soul to thrum. I run my long nails over the keys like I'm scratching the back of a lover.

Every time I'm in a foreign place and a different city, I'm always asking around to say, OK, well, what's special here in this particular place? What makes these people move here and why?

A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.

There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning.

Our very worst days are never beyond the reach of God's grace.

If you're asking me have I purchased a CD, a DVD or downloaded a current artist? The answer is no.

Above all remember your humanity.

Thank you Jesus you are a stone mover. And you can move any stone away.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.