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

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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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First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
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This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.
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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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How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.
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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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I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
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Speech isn't for agony.
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Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
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Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
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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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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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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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Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
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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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'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
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The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
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In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
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