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

Hortense Calisher

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Hortense Calisher
Age: 97 †
Born: 1911
Born: December 20
Died: 2009
Died: January 13
Author
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jack Fenno
Love
Clerks
Refusing
Bureaucracy

More quotes by Hortense Calisher

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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.
Hortense Calisher
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Speech isn't for agony.
Hortense Calisher
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Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
Hortense Calisher
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First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
Hortense Calisher
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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.
Hortense Calisher
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Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
Hortense Calisher
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In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
Hortense Calisher
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I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.
Hortense Calisher
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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.
Hortense Calisher
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What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.
Hortense Calisher
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Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
Hortense Calisher
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I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
Hortense Calisher
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The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
Hortense Calisher
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This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.
Hortense Calisher
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A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
Hortense Calisher
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'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
Hortense Calisher
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I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.
Hortense Calisher
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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.
Hortense Calisher