Hortense Calisher Quotes

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#4. He who, being a man, remains a woman, becomes a universal channel. Eternal virtue will flow through him. He will become a child again.

Lao-Tzu

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

Hortense Calisher

#6. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

#8. The novel is rescued life.

Hortense Calisher

#9. Being a person that others can trust is one of the most sought after qualities in the workplace today. So many leaders and their staff have shown in the recent global financial crisis a lack of trust and integrity amongst themselves and with their clients and other stakeholders.

Nigel Cumberland

#10. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

#12. With six small diamonds for his eyes
He walks upon the summer skies,
Drawing from his silken blouse
The lacework of his dwelling house.

Robert P. T. Coffin

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

Hortense Calisher

#14. 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

#15. They won't let any part of him fall to the ground," says Raffe in a quiet voice. "His brothers will keep him from falling."
In the distance, the Watchers weave a beautiful dance in the dawn sky beneath Beliel's shower of fire.

Susan Ee

#16. To be truly happy and fulfilled, you must be working toward accomplishing something that is bigger than yourself, and that makes a difference in the life or work of others.

Brian Tracy

#17. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

#19. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#24. Speech isn't for agony.

Hortense Calisher

#25. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.

Billy Collins

#26. The Spirit doesn't require our perfect performance to work with; He simply needs willingness to yield to whatever the Father wants to do.

Michael Brown

#27. {T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

Alice Walker

#28. Maturity is the moment one regains one's innocence.

Marty Rubin

#29. Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#32. No matter how useful we may be, sometimes it takes us a while to recognize our own value.

Benjamin Hoff

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#36. 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

#37. I can move around the way I want to. It's a beautiful thing. I don't know how long it'll last, but I'll certainly take advantage of it and try to be part of shifting and shaping the culture and preserving it.

Warryn Campbell

#38. I think people are frightened by different things, so I don't see myself as particularly courageous.

Robyn Davidson

#39. Agony without genius was gaucherie.

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher