Calisher Hortense 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

'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age. — Rick Smolan

The best gift that we can give to our friends is true love and sincere appreciation. — Debasish Mridha

Speech isn't for agony. — Hortense Calisher

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

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

The novel is rescued life. — Hortense Calisher

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

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

Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

Never chase love, affection, or attention. If it isn't given freely by another person, it isn't worth having. — Ashley Purdy

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

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

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

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

I make it a point to understand nothing of what I'm told. — Sienna McQuillen

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

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

Intimacy blossoms anytime you let down your socially acceptable mask. — Deepak Chopra

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

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

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

Because it was enough for one of those favorites of His Distinguished Highness to issue a thoughtless decree. These young smart alecks see it, and they immediately imagine some fatal result and come running to the rescue. They start trying to mend things, straighten things out, patch things up and untangle them. And so instead of using their energy to build their own vision of the future, instead of trying to put their irresponsible, destructive fantasies into action, our malcontents had to roll up their sleeves and start untangling what the minsters had knotted up. And there's always a lot of work to untangling! So they untangle and untangle, drenched in sweat, wearing their nerves to shreds, running around, patching things up here and there, and in all this rush and overwork, in this whirlwind, their fantasies slowly evaporate from their hot heads. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

Through a woman [Eve] a curse fell upon the earth; through a woman [Mary] as well there returned to the earth a blessing. — Peter Damian

When someone hurts us, our natural instinct is to strike back - but when we do, we not only destroy any possibility of reconciliation, but we also allow anger and hate to control us. — Billy Graham

A room without books is like a body without a soul. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

It isn't every day I get to meet a legend. Dan Cahill, I presume? - Dr. Tagamayer — Jude Watson

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 feather was a thing, when I was a kid, we used to find feathers around the house, and whenever we found them, my mum used to say it was my nan leaving them around for us to find, so that was quite sweet. — Liam Payne

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them. — Iain Sinclair

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