Hortense Calisher Quotes

#1. It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

Hortense Calisher

#2. Speech isn't for agony.

Hortense Calisher

#3. Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

Hortense Calisher

#4. Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Hortense Calisher

#5. If you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

Hortense Calisher

#6. What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

Hortense Calisher

#7. Perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Hortense Calisher

#8. This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

#9. The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

Hortense Calisher

#10. A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

Hortense Calisher

#11. Agony without genius was gaucherie.

Hortense Calisher

#12. Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

Hortense Calisher

#13. I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

Hortense Calisher

#14. 'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

Hortense Calisher

#15. The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

Hortense Calisher

#16. Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

Hortense Calisher

#17. But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.

Hortense Calisher

#18. In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

Hortense Calisher

#19. The novel is rescued life.

Hortense Calisher

#20. But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

Hortense Calisher

#21. I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

Hortense Calisher

#22. I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.

Hortense Calisher

#23. First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

Hortense Calisher

#24. Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon
as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.

Hortense Calisher

#25. It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

Hortense Calisher

#26. When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.

Hortense Calisher

#27. Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

Hortense Calisher

#28. The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

Hortense Calisher

#29. How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

Hortense Calisher