Margaret Caroline Anderson Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
When people told me that I knew nothing of reality I answered that reality was my greatest enemy, that I had fought it — successfully — all my life.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
How can anyone be interested in war? — that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over the mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well-chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it — this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?

Margaret Caroline Anderson
To one of my intense inter-uterine nature there is no measuring the shock that the loss of a house can cause.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
Our talk began with luncheon, reached a climax at tea, and by dinner we were staggering with it. By five o'clock in the morning we were unconscious but still talking.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
Order is life to me. I could, if necessary, live in dirt but never in disorder.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
People with heavy physical vibrations rule the world.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their pleasure comes from what they know about things, and their pride, from showing off what they know.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I disapprove of snobbery in matters of thought as intensely as I approve of it in matters of dress. Good thinking never springs from snobbery — good dressing from little else.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
[Intellectuals] have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
It has been years since I have seen anyone who could even look as if he were in love. No one's face lights up any more except for political conversation.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim — for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths — when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines... I change everyone's coiffure — except those that please me — and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I am always disturbed when someone catches me on the wing and asks me if I don't want to do something. I want to answer: 'I never want to do anything, at any time, except to continue what I am already doing until I have finished it.'

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity — that you're always being suppressed if you're inspired and always being pushed into a corner if you're exceptional. I won't be cornered and I won't stay suppressed.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
I have never lived in a room that wasn't a still-life — I couldn't.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
The great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.

Margaret Caroline Anderson
The meaning of genius is that it doesn't have to work to attain what people without it must labor for—and not attain.

Margaret Caroline Anderson