Herself: An Autobiographical Work
A source page for quotes linked to Hortense Calisher.
“'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.”
“First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.”
“When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.”
“How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.”
“I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.”
“In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.”
“I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.”
“perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.”
“Agony without genius was gaucherie.”
“if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.”
“Decades go faster toward the end of a century.”
“Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.”
“The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.”
“It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.”
“The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.”
“This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.”
“I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.”
“The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.”
“What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.”