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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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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
People
Became
Took
Called
Moment
Grotesque
Moments
Embraced
Truth
Falsehood
Live
Truths
Life
Tried

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
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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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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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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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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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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I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.
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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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 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 fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.
Sherwood Anderson
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Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.
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