Quotes from Hortense Calisher

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

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.

perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

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.

The novel is rescued life.

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

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

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.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

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

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

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

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