Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Sherwood Anderson

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A man needs a purpose for real health.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

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.

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

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

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.

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.

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.

Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.

Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.

Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

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.

You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

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

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.

The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.

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

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.

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.

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.

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.

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy.

The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.

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.

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.

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

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

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

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.

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

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

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.