Quote

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Men
Grew
Bear
Clods
Time
Become
Seemed
Clod
Think
Also
Extraordinary
Terribly
Thinking
Better
Bears
Passed
Life
Wanted
Importance
Fellow
Like
Great
Looked
Fellows
People
Thing
Lived
Apart
Make
Saws
Began

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
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It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.
Sherwood Anderson
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All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.
Sherwood Anderson
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Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson
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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.
Sherwood Anderson
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I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
Sherwood Anderson
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Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
Sherwood Anderson
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It is no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.
Sherwood Anderson
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The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
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The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
Sherwood Anderson
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The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Sherwood Anderson
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Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
Sherwood Anderson
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Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy.
Sherwood Anderson
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Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.
Sherwood Anderson
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Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?
Sherwood Anderson