Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

“She is always pretending she loves me, but look at her now. Am I in her thoughts? Is there a tender look in her eyes? Is she dreaming of me as she walks along the streets?”

“You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

“The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of...”

“Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these th...”

“The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the ...”

“There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they ...”

“I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I crie...”

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure a...”

“Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.”

“Most of us live our lives like toads, sitting perfectly still, under a plantain leaf. We are waiting for a fly to come our way. When it comes out darts the tongue. We nab it.That is all. We eat it.”

“But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn't their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the m...”

“Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.”

“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.”

“Interest in the lives of others the high evaluation of these lives what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself the value he attributes to his own being?”

“If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders how is all life to become important to him?”

“I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass make love work when they have to bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.”

“General Grant had a simple childlike recipe for meeting life ... "I am terribly afraid but the other fellow is afraid too."”

“Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.”

“It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.”