Hortense Calisher Quotes

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon -- as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.

perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

The novel is rescued life.

Speech isn't for agony.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.