Hortense Calisher Quotes

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

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

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.

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

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 novel is rescued life.

Speech isn't for agony.

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

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.