Hortense Calisher Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

His book was an instant success with those who thought of themselves as thinking for themselves (if they had only had time for it).

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

Hortense Calisher
If you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

Hortense Calisher
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 Calisher
Perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Hortense Calisher
First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

Hortense Calisher
To write in the first person seems the easiest. As all young journal-writers assume. Actually it may be hardest—there are so many hazards. Garrulity. Lack of shape, or proportion. Or even of judgment.

Hortense Calisher
All you can hope to be is worthy of the company you respect.

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

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

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

Hortense Calisher
She was one of those women who used their charge accounts for retaliation. With each crisis in their deteriorating relationship, Grorley noted gloomily, Eunice's wardrobe had improved.

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

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

Hortense Calisher
Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand.

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

Hortense Calisher
A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

Hortense Calisher