Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Andersonwas an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 September 1876
CityCamden, OH
CountryUnited States of America
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.
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.
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.
It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.
I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self ...
He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.
I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.
The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.
Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
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.