Sherwood Anderson Quotes

I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.

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?

People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.

I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.

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?

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.

One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes.

I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt some one else.

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.

You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living.

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

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.

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, where in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form - to make it true and real to the theme, not to life ...
I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.

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.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

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.

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.

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.

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

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.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self ...

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.

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.

Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions ...

I know about her, although she has never crossed my path," he said softly. "I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats she has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get.

The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of and that had come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike. They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her.

For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler's son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed.

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. [ ... ]
There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.

You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small,' I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. 'Be little. Don't try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.' I got all of these sayings at my tongue's end, used to go through the streets of Chicago muttering them to myself.

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls.

To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.

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.

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.

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?

When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.

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?

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.

It is all right you're saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot of people who need you.

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.

The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.

The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.

People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.

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.

The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.

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.

He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. 'I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,' he said. 'I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places.

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.

The whole object of education is ... to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.

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.

Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.

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.

Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

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.

Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words.

The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed.

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

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.

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.

Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn't their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That's what I'm after.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.

Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.

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.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?

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.

He had always thought of himself as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out successfully.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
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.
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
You won't arrive. It is an endless search.

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.

Friends you have, people you love, die and are born again.

It hadn't shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.

Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.

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.

It is no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.

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.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

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.

What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well―to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it―to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?

If you have your own kind of power, show your hand. Make the man fear you in you own field. For example, you can write. Your rich man cannot do that. It is quite all right to exercise your own power. Have faith in yourself. ~ 151, SA: Sh. Stories, 1962

I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.

The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.

A man needs a purpose for real health.

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.

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.

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.

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?.

As so often happens in life, he had thought so much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence. ~ 27, SA: Sh. Stories, 1962

The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. 'You must pay attention to me,' he urged. 'If something happens you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. 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 that.

There are men everywhere who talk and talk, saying nothing. I am afraid I am becoming one of that kind.

It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.