185 Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,′ he had said. ‘You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas 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.

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.

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.

It was as though her woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.

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.

If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words.

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.

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.