Top 100 Sherwood Anderson Quotes
#1. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog.
Sherwood Anderson
#2. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
Sherwood Anderson
#3. There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.
Sherwood Anderson
#4. Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
Sherwood Anderson
#5. I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
#6. To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. one has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship.
Sherwood Anderson
#7. It might be that women who have been
nurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taught
to have too much respect
Sherwood Anderson
#8. Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
Sherwood Anderson
#9. Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
Sherwood Anderson
#10. I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
Sherwood Anderson
#12. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
#13. I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.
Sherwood Anderson
#14. The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
Sherwood Anderson
#15. I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.
Sherwood Anderson
#16. It hadn't shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.
Sherwood Anderson
#17. Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.
Sherwood Anderson
#18. More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish?
Sherwood Anderson
#19. It is this - that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget.
Sherwood Anderson
#20. I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?
Sherwood Anderson
#21. All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child
something of that sort
gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.
Sherwood Anderson
#22. To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.
Sherwood Anderson
#23. I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men ... It blew ideas away.
Sherwood Anderson
#24. I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.
Sherwood Anderson
#25. I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson
#26. I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson
#27. Their bodies were different as were the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.
Sherwood Anderson
#28. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.
Sherwood Anderson
#29. I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.
Sherwood Anderson
#30. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art
although it may possibly be very good journalism?
Sherwood Anderson
#31. I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.
Sherwood Anderson
#33. If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.
Sherwood Anderson
#34. It did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened.
Sherwood Anderson
#35. It is all right you're saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot of people who need you.
Sherwood Anderson
#36. He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.
Sherwood Anderson
#37. Most of us live our lives like toads, sitting perfectly still, under a plantain leaf. We are waiting for a fly to come our way. When it comes out darts the tongue. We nab it.
That is all. We eat it.
Sherwood Anderson
#38. If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
Sherwood Anderson
#40. At bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten percent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
Sherwood Anderson
#41. Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.
Sherwood Anderson
#42. I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt some one else.
Sherwood Anderson
#44. It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.
Sherwood Anderson
#45. I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.
Sherwood Anderson
#46. The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.
Sherwood Anderson
#47. How dirty she was, how thin, what a wild look she had! I have never seen a wilder-looking creature. Her eyes were bright. They were like the eyes of a wild animal.
Sherwood Anderson
#48. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.
Sherwood Anderson
#49. In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in stores ran madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself.
Sherwood Anderson
#50. It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
#51. You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living.
Sherwood Anderson
#52. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.
Sherwood Anderson
#53. There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.
Sherwood Anderson
#54. Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.
Sherwood Anderson
#55. It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
Sherwood Anderson
#56. You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.
Sherwood Anderson
#57. If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.
Sherwood Anderson
#58. The whole object of education is ... to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson
#59. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
Sherwood Anderson
#60. People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.
Sherwood Anderson
#61. Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.
Sherwood Anderson
#62. Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.
Sherwood Anderson
#63. That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
Sherwood Anderson
#64. I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.
Sherwood Anderson
#65. There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.
Sherwood Anderson
#66. Robert Ingersoll came to [a small Midwest town] to speak ... , and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens.
Sherwood Anderson
#67. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all.
Sherwood Anderson
#68. The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
Sherwood Anderson
#70. Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world. To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in the world. But hungering is not enough.
Sherwood Anderson
#71. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.
Sherwood Anderson
#72. Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
#73. She thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.
Sherwood Anderson
#74. If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.
Sherwood Anderson
#75. We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.
Sherwood Anderson
#76. What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
#78. When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.
Sherwood Anderson
#79. Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.
Sherwood Anderson
#80. In the world of fancy even the most base man's actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.
Sherwood Anderson
#81. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
Sherwood Anderson
#82. Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.
Sherwood Anderson
#83. I'll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That's all I've got in mind.
Sherwood Anderson
#84. Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn't matter so much. It's what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.
Sherwood Anderson
#87. There are men everywhere who talk and talk, saying nothing. I am afraid I am becoming one of that kind.
Sherwood Anderson
#88. All of the people of my time were bound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn. They had forgotten the west winds.
Sherwood Anderson
#89. The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.
Sherwood Anderson
#90. The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self ...
Sherwood Anderson
#91. Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.
Sherwood Anderson
#92. What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?
Sherwood Anderson
#93. The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
Sherwood Anderson
#94. The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed.
Sherwood Anderson
#95. You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.
Sherwood Anderson
#96. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.
Sherwood Anderson
#97. I'll be washed and ironed. I'll be washed and ironed and starched.
Sherwood Anderson
#98. She is always pretending she loves me, but look at her now. Am I in her thoughts? Is there a tender look in her eyes? Is she dreaming of me as she walks along the streets?
Sherwood Anderson
#99. The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
Sherwood Anderson
#100. If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
Sherwood Anderson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top