Hortense Calisher Quotes

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

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.

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

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

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

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

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

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

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.

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

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

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

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

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.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

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

Speech isn't for agony.

The novel is rescued life.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

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.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

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

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

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

When anything gets freed a zest goes round the world.