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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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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
Artist
Seats
Art
Critics
Presided
Nature
Judgment
Kneeling
Without
Sitting
Parish
Every
Stand
Fights
Fighting
Respectable
Church
Critic
Born
Seat

More quotes by Hortense Calisher

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