Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Hortense Calisher

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Hortense Calisher.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Hortense Calisher

Hortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction and the second female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Agony without genius was gaucherie.
Decades go faster toward the end of a century.
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends. — © Hortense Calisher
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.
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.
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.
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.
Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.
perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.
'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
The novel is rescued life.
This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.
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.
The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.
The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.
How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.
Speech isn't for agony.
What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race. — © Hortense Calisher
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
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.
Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
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