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

#Morning #Writing #Thinking

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Art #Art Is #Save Yourself

“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

#Life #Men #Climbing

“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.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Heart #Hands #Years

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

#Education #Mind #Should

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

#People #Alive

“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

#New York #Thinking #Long

“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

#Horse #Envy #Sick

“You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Endless

“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Strong #Venture #Courageous

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Love #Lovers #Found

“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

#Stupid #Book #Writing

“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

#Disappointment #Kissing #Blow

“It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#May #Life Is #Moments

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

#Thinking #Iron #Heavy

“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

#Country #Dog #Children

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

#Humble #Drawing #Trying

“A man needs a purpose for real health.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Real #Men #Purpose

“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

#Money #Men #Order

“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

#Sweet #Feet #Air

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

#Fighting #Self #Disease

“All of the people of my time were bound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn. They had forgotten the west winds.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Wind #Long #People

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

#Mean #Past #Want

“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.”
-- Sherwood Anderson

#Dream #Men #Voice

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

#Book #Men #White

“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

#War #Men #Ideas

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

#Lying #Writing #Thinking

“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

#People #Moments #Grotesque

“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

#Father #Son #Men

“Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.”
-- Sherwood Anderson