Sherwood Anderson Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.

Sherwood Anderson
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.

Sherwood Anderson
Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.

Sherwood Anderson
I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.

Sherwood Anderson
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.

Sherwood Anderson
I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.

Sherwood Anderson
Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.

Sherwood Anderson
I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.

Sherwood Anderson
There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

Sherwood Anderson
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Sherwood Anderson
You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small," I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. "Be little. Don't try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.

Sherwood Anderson
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.

Sherwood Anderson
Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

Sherwood Anderson
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

Sherwood Anderson
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

Sherwood Anderson
The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is... the disease of self...

Sherwood Anderson
I'll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That's all I've got in mind.

Sherwood Anderson
What's wrong with this egotism? 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?

Sherwood Anderson
It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.

Sherwood Anderson
If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

Sherwood Anderson
If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

Sherwood Anderson
My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a "sign-writer.

Sherwood Anderson
I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.

Sherwood Anderson
I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

Sherwood Anderson
Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn't matter so much. It's what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.

Sherwood Anderson
There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.

Sherwood Anderson
Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

Sherwood Anderson
People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.

Sherwood Anderson
Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

Sherwood Anderson
Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

Sherwood Anderson