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Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson Quotes

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Famous Sherwood Anderson Quotes

“I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.”

KnowsMenWritingLittlesKnowledgePaintingPainterAmazedManufacturingMerchants
Book:Letters: selected and edited with an introd. and notes by Howard Mumford Jones, in association with Walter B. Rideout
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“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.”

MenKindOrderMoneyLowsChickensMentalityFoxesGet MoneyShrewdness
Book:Letters: selected and edited with an introd. and notes by Howard Mumford Jones, in association with Walter B. Rideout
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“There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.”

ThinkingKnowsMenWayTryingHumansHeartMayLittlesHas BeensRealSoulUseBigsRunningDifficultSidesVoiceFoolGoes OnNotesCurrentsTinyBoastExplosionsHeart And SoulWearinessHuman Voice
Book:Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories
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“In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.”

MenWayFeelsAmericaSongTurnsMemoriesCitiesBoysDarknessStreetsMiddleFieldsPromiseShadowMachinesTownsLipsHungerAwakeningDustMaturityHeatFactoriesAwkwardCoalCrackedRoaringFurnacesOur TownCity StreetsMiddle America
Author:Sherwood Anderson
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“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.”

MenMayLittlesSeemsFatherEmotionalSonMen And WomenBeing TrueFixedFather And SonEmotional Life
Book:Letters: selected and edited with an introd. and notes by Howard Mumford Jones, in association with Walter B. Rideout
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“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.”

MenMomentsPassionAdventureArmsLoversHundredLongingDearPassionateLovelyRememberedRanOver YouCriedGirlhood
Book:Winesburg, Ohio
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“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.”

IfsMenWorldFirstsLooksBoysSeeingDoorsSadnessFiguresFirst TimeNothingnessTornImaginativeSophisticationProcession
Book:Winesburg, Ohio
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“I know about her, although she has never crossed my path," he said softly. "I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats she has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get.”

KnowsMenNeedsHas BeensMadeSaidBodyNamesStrongBornQualityStrugglePathDefeatLovelyDreamer
Book:Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories: Winesburg, Ohio / The Triumph of the Egg / Horses and Men / Death in the Woods / Uncollected Stories (Library of America #235)
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“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.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsMenWantedSawsGrewBearsImportanceFellowsExtraordinaryFellow Man
Book:Winesburg, Ohio
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