Hortense Quotes & Sayings

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

I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere. — Bobbie Ann Mason

With only one life to live we can't afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit. — Hortense Odlum

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

Hollywood provides ready-made fantasies or daydreams; the problem is whether these are productive or nonproductive, whether the audience is psychologically enriched or impoverished. — Hortense Powdermaker

Where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?"
"She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr Bucket. "You'll see her there, my dear."
"I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting tigress-like. "You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr Bucket.
"I would!" making her eyes very large. "I would love to tear her, limb from limb."
"Bless you, darling," says Mr Bucket, with the greatest composure; "I'm fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one another, when you do differ. — Charles Dickens

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

I am an organization person, I believe in individuals banding together. I don't believe in unilateral actions. Some people don't like organizations. But it is always awesome to me when you can pool a lot of talent and a lot of people who have so many talents. That is when you really can make your program move. — Hortense Canady

Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.
Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence. — Honore De Balzac

In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology. — Hortense Powdermaker

Speech isn't for agony. — Hortense Calisher

A business career for a woman and her need for a woman's life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other. — Hortense Odlum

This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation. — Hortense Odlum

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

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

South Sea natives who have been exposed to American movies classify them into two types, 'kiss-kiss' and 'bang-bang. — Hortense Powdermaker

How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it! — Hortense Odlum

All entertainment is education in some way, many times more effective than schools because of the appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect. — Hortense Powdermaker

If a person goes to his job with a firm determination to give of himself the best of which he is capable, that job no matter what it is takes on dignity and importance. — Hortense Odlum

One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have, comes from the knowledge that he can do some one thing superlatively well. — Hortense Odlum

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

If you don't realize there is always somebody who knows how to do something better than you, then you don't give proper respects for others' talents. — Hortense Canady

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

Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies. — Hortense Powdermaker

As unmarried business women we must constantly use our opportunities in business in such a way that we are prepared for the marriage which may be ours tomorrow. — Hortense Odlum

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

No life if it is properly realized is without its cosmic importance. — Hortense Odlum

The home is a woman's natural background ... From the beginning I tried to have the policy of the store reflect as nearly as it was possible in the commercial world, those standards of comfort and grace which are apparent in a lovely home. — Hortense Odlum

Hortense. We broke — Heather Webb

A completely indifferent attitude toward clothes in women seems to me to be an admission of inferiority, of perverseness, or of alack of realization of her place in the world as a woman. Or
what is even more hopeless and pathetic
it's an admission that she has given up, that she is beaten, and refuses longer to stand up to the world. — Hortense Odlum

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

Our chaotic economic situation has convinced so many of our young people that there is no room for them. They become uncertain andrestless and morbid; they grab at false promises, embrace false gods and judge things by treacherous values. Their insecurity makes them believe that tomorrow doesn't matter and the ineffectualness of their lives makes them deny the ideals which we of an older generation acknowledged. — Hortense Odlum

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

The Hollywood atmosphere of crises and continuous anxiety is a kind of hysteria which prevents people from thinking, and is not too different from the way dictators use wars and continuous threats of war as an emotional basis for maintaining their power. — Hortense Powdermaker

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

Business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,
if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life. — Hortense Odlum

Not rarely, and this is especially true of wives and mothers, the motive behind assuming a disproportionate share of work and responsibility is completely unselfish. We want to protect, to spare those of whom we are fond. We forget that, regardless of the motive, the results of such action are almost always destructive and unproductive. — Hortense Odlum

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

Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay. — Emile Zola

The artist in all societies has traditionally been a kind of barometer, more sensitive to nuances and changes than others, because he is more deeply immersed in his culture and more interested in its meanings. — Hortense Powdermaker

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

It is not serving, but servility, that is menial. — Hortense Odlum

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

Persons who insist to themselves that under one set of conditions only can they lead interesting and satisfying lives lay themselves open to bitter disappointments and frustrations. — Hortense Odlum

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

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

It seemed pathetic and terrible to me and it still does, that men and women work eight hours a day at jobs that bring them no joy, no reward save a few dollars. — Hortense Odlum

In Hollywood, the ... basic freedom of being able to choose between alternatives is absent. The gifted people who have the capacity for choice cannot exercise it; the executives who technically have the freedom of choice do not actually have it, because they usually lack the knowledge and imagination necessary for making such a choice. — Hortense Powdermaker

The novel is rescued life. — Hortense Calisher

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

Adventure, without it, why live? — Hortense Odlum

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

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

Living each day as a preparation for the next is an exciting way to live. Looking forward to something is much more fun than looking back at somethingand much more constructive. If we can prepare ourselves so that we never have to think, 'Oh, if I had only known, if I had only been ready,' our lives can really be the great adventure we so passionately want them to be. — Hortense Odlum