Quotes from Sherwood Anderson

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. 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.

Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.

One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.

Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night…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 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 make tender by kisses.

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.

As so often happens in life, he had thought so much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence.

It was as though her woman's hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.

It did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened.

She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.

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

I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.

Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words.

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

Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.

More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish?

In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in stores ran madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself.

What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well?to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it?to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?

Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.

There are men everywhere who talk and talk, saying nothing. I am afraid I am becoming one of that kind.

He had always thought of himself as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out successfully.

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty. I shall not try to emphasize the point. I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.

I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them

It might be that women who have been nurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taught to have too much respect