185 Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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?

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

Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgments of life.

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

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.

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.

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

She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.