Sherwood Anderson Quotes & Sayings

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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

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

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

Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid. — Sherwood Anderson

If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present. — Sherwood Anderson

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

She thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in stores ran madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself. — Sherwood Anderson

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written. — Sherwood Anderson

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 — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world. To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in the world. But hungering is not enough. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words. — Sherwood Anderson

I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

A man needs a purpose for real health. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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 ... — Sherwood Anderson

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

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? — Sherwood Anderson

There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. — Sherwood Anderson

I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded white horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.
One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again.
("Paper Pills") — Sherwood Anderson

I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men ... It blew ideas away. — Sherwood Anderson

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

I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — 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. — Sherwood Anderson

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples. — Sherwood Anderson

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

In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song. — Sherwood Anderson

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. — Sherwood Anderson

It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say. — Sherwood Anderson

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

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. — Sherwood Anderson

He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness. — Sherwood Anderson

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

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction. — Sherwood Anderson

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