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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
Wish
Live
Intend
Thing
Forces
Life
Driven
Outside
Inside
Called
Force

More quotes by 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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The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.
Sherwood Anderson
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You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.
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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Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.
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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If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
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 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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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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Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
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Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. 'The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two.
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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Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
Sherwood Anderson
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I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.
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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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 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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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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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