Hortense Calisher
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.Collection: Writing
Agony without genius was gaucherie.Collection: Agony
if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.Collection: Technology
When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.Collection: Helping Others
perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.Collection: Prayer
'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.Collection: Wind
Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon -- as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.Collection: Uncles
I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.Collection: Critics
Decades go faster toward the end of a century.Collection: Time
It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.Collection: Writing
But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.Collection: Memories
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.Collection: Race
Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.Collection: Science
The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.Collection: Process
The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.Collection: Dream
How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.Collection: Clerks
Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.Collection: Travel
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.Collection: Coffee
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.Collection: Poetry
In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.Collection: Family
But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.Collection: Travel
The novel is rescued life.Collection: Novel
Speech isn't for agony.Collection: Agony
This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.Collection: Success
A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.Collection: Children
Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.Collection: Art
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.Collection: Balance
First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.Collection: Dream
What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.Collection: Writing