Quotes by Sherwood Anderson

“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...”

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

“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?”

“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."”

“The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, th...”

“We have not approached the time when we may speak to each other, but in the mornings sometimes I have heard, echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us...”

“In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All...”

“On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place...”

“Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”

“You will have to know life, she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by...”

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night, he had said. You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the...”

“The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind ...”

“We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our...”

“Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world. To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in...”

“Writers in the twenties reacted not only to the shock of the First World War but to the values held dear in the nineteenth century. The stock responses of good will and progressive enlightenment as...”