Top 53 Hortense Quotes

#1. South Sea natives who have been exposed to American movies classify them into two types, 'kiss-kiss' and 'bang-bang.

Hortense Powdermaker

#2. If you don't realize there is always somebody who knows how to do something better than you, then you don't give proper respects for others' talents.

Hortense Canady

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

Hortense Calisher

#4. Speech isn't for agony.

Hortense Calisher

#5. Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay.

Emile Zola

#6. Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

Hortense Calisher

#7. As unmarried business women we must constantly use our opportunities in business in such a way that we are prepared for the marriage which may be ours tomorrow.

Hortense Odlum

#8. Hortense. We broke

Heather Webb

#9. The Hollywood atmosphere of crises and continuous anxiety is a kind of hysteria which prevents people from thinking, and is not too different from the way dictators use wars and continuous threats of war as an emotional basis for maintaining their power.

Hortense Powdermaker

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

Hortense Calisher

#11. A business career for a woman and her need for a woman's life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other.

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

#13. It is not serving, but servility, that is menial.

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#17. The artist in all societies has traditionally been a kind of barometer, more sensitive to nuances and changes than others, because he is more deeply immersed in his culture and more interested in its meanings.

Hortense Powdermaker

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

Hortense Calisher

#19. 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

#20. The home is a woman's natural background ... From the beginning I tried to have the policy of the store reflect as nearly as it was possible in the commercial world, those standards of comfort and grace which are apparent in a lovely home.

Hortense Odlum

#21. Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.
Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.

Honore De Balzac

#22. Agony without genius was gaucherie.

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#26. In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology.

Hortense Powdermaker

#27. How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it!

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

#29. One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have, comes from the knowledge that he can do some one thing superlatively well.

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

#31. Adventure, without it, why live?

Hortense Odlum

#32. Hollywood provides ready-made fantasies or daydreams; the problem is whether these are productive or nonproductive, whether the audience is psychologically enriched or impoverished.

Hortense Powdermaker

#33. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

#35. Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies.

Hortense Powdermaker

#36. The novel is rescued life.

Hortense Calisher

#37. This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation.

Hortense Odlum

#38. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Hortense Calisher

#41. I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Hortense Calisher

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. All entertainment is education in some way, many times more effective than schools because of the appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect.

Hortense Powdermaker

#46. If a person goes to his job with a firm determination to give of himself the best of which he is capable, that job no matter what it is takes on dignity and importance.

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

#48. Persons who insist to themselves that under one set of conditions only can they lead interesting and satisfying lives lay themselves open to bitter disappointments and frustrations.

Hortense Odlum

#49. It seemed pathetic and terrible to me and it still does, that men and women work eight hours a day at jobs that bring them no joy, no reward save a few dollars.

Hortense Odlum

#50. 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

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

Hortense Calisher

#52. No life if it is properly realized is without its cosmic importance.

Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense Calisher

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