How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. Hortense Calisher More Quotes by Hortense Calisher More Quotes From Hortense Calisher The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind. Hortense Calisher shapes mind writing 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. Hortense Calisher phrases stories writing perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer. Hortense Calisher spurs meditation prayer if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications. Hortense Calisher deaf technology ears 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. Hortense Calisher wreaths emphasis memories 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. Hortense Calisher uncles smart believe Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts. Hortense Calisher light facts travel I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk. Hortense Calisher coffee speak men Agony without genius was gaucherie. Hortense Calisher agony genius suffering I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends. Hortense Calisher solace nuisance poetry This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out. Hortense Calisher success writing ideas In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts. Hortense Calisher intimacy lines family I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity. Hortense Calisher posterity critics The novel is rescued life. Hortense Calisher novel A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. Hortense Calisher rainbow memories children The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it. Hortense Calisher process shows young The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to. Hortense Calisher standards dream What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am. Hortense Calisher most-powerful written writing 'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind. Hortense Calisher sound bees wind 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. Hortense Calisher mankind feet travel
