Hortense Calisher quotes
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“This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Herself: An Autobiographical Work”, p.62, Open Road Media
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“Agony without genius was gaucherie.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Mysteries of Motion: A Novel”, p.261, Open Road Media
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“Speech isn't for agony.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Standard Dreaming: A Novella”, p.76, Open Road Media
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“if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Mysteries of Motion: A Novel”, p.33, Open Road Media
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“Decades go faster toward the end of a century.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (1983). “Mysteries of motion”, Doubleday
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“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 CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (1983). “Mysteries of motion”, Doubleday
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“Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“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 -
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“The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Standard Dreaming: A Novella”, p.43, Open Road Media
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“It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Standard Dreaming: A Novella”, p.47, Open Road Media
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“The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Standard Dreaming: A Novella”, p.48, Open Road Media
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“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 CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (1983). “Mysteries of motion”, Doubleday
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“The novel is rescued life.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Herself: An Autobiographical Work”, p.434, Open Road Media
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“Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (1983). “Mysteries of motion”, Doubleday
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“I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher”, p.629, Open Road Media
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“I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Extreme Magic: Eight Stories and a Novella”, p.81, Open Road Media
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“A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (1971). “Queenie: a novel”, McNally & Loftin Publishers
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“What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
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“'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Herself: An Autobiographical Work”, p.494, Open Road Media
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“Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
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“How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “Mysteries of Motion: A Novel”, p.70, Open Road Media
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“I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.”
-- Hortense Calisher -
“In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.”
-- Hortense CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “On Keeping Women: A Novel”, p.264, Open Road Media
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“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 CalisherSource : Hortense Calisher (2013). “In the Absence of Angels: Stories”, p.88, Open Road Media
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“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
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