Hortense Calisher Quotes & Sayings

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts. — Hortense Calisher

Perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer. — Hortense Calisher

Agony without genius was gaucherie. — Hortense Calisher

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles. — Hortense Calisher

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

Decades go faster toward the end of a century. — Hortense Calisher

Speech isn't for agony. — Hortense Calisher

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind. — Hortense Calisher

When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world. — Hortense Calisher

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity. — Hortense Calisher

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

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends. — Hortense Calisher

If you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications. — Hortense Calisher

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

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind. — Hortense Calisher

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

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race. — Hortense Calisher

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm. — Hortense Calisher

The novel is rescued life. — Hortense Calisher

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts. — Hortense Calisher

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk. — Hortense Calisher

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

The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to. — Hortense Calisher

First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life. — Hortense Calisher

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out. — Hortense Calisher

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. — Hortense Calisher

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

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it. — Hortense Calisher

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am. — Hortense Calisher