Sherwood Anderson Quotes

I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. 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. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

There was something, a driving destructive thing in life, in all relationships between people.

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Vatanperverlikle alakası olmayan savaşların yapılacağı, insanların Tanrı'yı unutup sadece ahlaki değerlere dikkat edeceği, iktidar isteğinin hizmet isteğinin yerine geçeceği ve insanoğlunun pervasızca servet edinme telaşının güzelliği neredeyse unutturacağı, dünya tarihindeki bu en maddiyatçı çağın başlangıcının hikâyesi Tanrı'nın kulu Jesse'yi de, tıpkı etrafındaki diğerleri gibi etkisi altına alıyordu.

you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

The devil — one might face anything if one but knew what was to be faced! ~117, SA: Sh. Stories, 1962

I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt some one else.

عشق مثل نسیمی یه که علف های زیر درخت ها رو توی یه شب تاریک تکون می ده . کسی نباید سعی کنه به عشق تحقق ببخشه . عشق یه حادثه متعالی تو زندگی یه . اگه سعی کنی به عشق تحقق ببخشی و ازش خاطر جمع بشی و زیر درخت ها , اونجا که نسیم لطیف شبانه ای می وزه زندگی کنی روزهای گرم و طولانی نارضایتی به سرعت از راه می رسن و گردو غبار گاری های در حال گذر روی لبای پر التهاب و ناسور از بوسه هات می شینن .

We have not approached the time when we may speak to each other, but in the mornings sometimes I have heard, echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog.

People in your own family are likely at any moment to do strange, sometimes hurtful things to you. You have to watch them.

"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."

ადამიანთა ცხოვრება ტყეში ახალგაზრდა ხეებივითაა. მათ ახრჩობთ მხვიარა ვაზები. მხვიარები ძველი აზრები და რწმენებია, მკვდართა მიერ დარგული

"Alice used to say the whole problem of life lay in getting past what she called the "times between.

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, where in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form - to make it true and real to the theme, not to life ...
I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.