Hortense Calisher famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Writing #Ideas #Acting
Agony without genius was gaucherie.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Agony #Suffering #Genius
Speech isn't for agony.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Agony #Suffering #Speech
if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Technology #Ears #Deaf
Decades go faster toward the end of a century.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Time #Century #Ends
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.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Travel #Feet #Mankind
Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Travel #Light #Facts
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.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Writing #Phrases #Stories
The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Dream #Standards
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Race #People #Lifetime
The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Process #Young #Shows
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.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Uncles #Smart #Believe
The novel is rescued life.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Novel
Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Science #Alarms #Guilty
perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Prayer #Meditation #Spurs
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Poetry #Nuisance #Solace
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Coffee #Men #Speak
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Writing #Mind #Shapes
A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Memories #Rainbow #Childhood
What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Writing #Most Powerful
'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Wind #Sound #Bees
First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Dream #Book #Reading
When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Helping Others #Zest #People
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Balance #Body #Compromise
How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Clerks #Bureaucracy
I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Critics #Posterity
In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Family #Lines #Intimacy
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.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Memories #Wreaths #Emphasis
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.
-- Hortense Calisher

#Art #Fighting #Church

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