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.
Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.
The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.
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.
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.
When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.
Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved in life.
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.
If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.