Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Ground
Air
Failure
Sweet
Feet
Make
Good
Trial
Trials

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

Image
Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
Sherwood Anderson
Image
Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.
Sherwood Anderson