Sherwood Anderson - People Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all Sherwood Anderson Quotes
"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 might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

Sherwood Anderson
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

Sherwood Anderson
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

Sherwood Anderson
People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.

Sherwood Anderson
Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

Sherwood Anderson
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 the world. But hungering is not enough.

Sherwood Anderson
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

Sherwood Anderson
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

Sherwood Anderson
As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

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

Sherwood Anderson
All of the people of my time were bound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn. They had forgotten the west winds.

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