Quote

There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Inside
Called
Force
Wish
Live
Intend
Thing
Forces
Life
Driven
Outside

More quotes by 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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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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I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
Sherwood Anderson
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What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
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I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
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Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
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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In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers
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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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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The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson
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Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.
Sherwood Anderson
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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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My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer.
Sherwood Anderson
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The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
Sherwood Anderson
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Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
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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Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.
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