Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

“People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.”

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is th...”

“To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. one has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship.”

“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved.”

“Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.”

“We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into ou...”

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the...”

“I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.”

“The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard ...”

“He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was a...”

“One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.”

“To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.”

“I wanted, as all men do, to belong. To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its pa...”

“All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the...”

“If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran ra...”

“I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling...”

“Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in mys...”

“I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.”

“You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thi...”

“The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of and that had come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they w...”