Top 100 Sherwood Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.”

— Sherwood Anderson

2. “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”

— Sherwood Anderson

3. “There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.”

— Sherwood Anderson

4. “The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.”

— Sherwood Anderson

5. “I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.”

— Sherwood Anderson

6. “A man needs a purpose for real health.”

— Sherwood Anderson

7. “It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.”

— Sherwood Anderson

8. “The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”

— Sherwood Anderson

9. “The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.”

— Sherwood Anderson

10. “It is all right you’re saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot of people who need you.”

— Sherwood Anderson

11. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

12. “Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t matter so much. It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.”

— Sherwood Anderson

13. “Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”

— Sherwood Anderson

14. “I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.”

— Sherwood Anderson

15. “It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.”

— Sherwood Anderson

16. “If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.”

— Sherwood Anderson

17. “Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.”

— Sherwood Anderson

18. “He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.”

— Sherwood Anderson

19. “I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.”

— Sherwood Anderson

20. “What’s wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?”

— Sherwood Anderson

21. “When a job is to be done there’s no use putting it off.”

— Sherwood Anderson

22. “Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgments of life.”

— Sherwood Anderson

23. “The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.”

— Sherwood Anderson

24. “I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”

— Sherwood Anderson

25. “The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.”

— Sherwood Anderson

26. “You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.”

— Sherwood Anderson

27. “I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.”

— Sherwood Anderson

28. “People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.”

— Sherwood Anderson

29. “In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers.”

— Sherwood Anderson

30. “Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.”

— Sherwood Anderson

31. “You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.”

— Sherwood Anderson

32. “Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.”

— Sherwood Anderson

33. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

34. “It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.”

— Sherwood Anderson

35. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

36. “Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world. To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in the world. But hungering is not enough.”

— Sherwood Anderson

37. “I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.”

— Sherwood Anderson

38. “She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.”

— Sherwood Anderson

39. “I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t know. I guess I don’t care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That’s all I’ve got in mind.”

— Sherwood Anderson

40. “You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can’t make a living.”

— Sherwood Anderson

41. “The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas 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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

42. “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”

— Sherwood Anderson

43. “Io sono uno che ama e non ho trovato la cosa da amare.”

— Sherwood Anderson

44. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

45. “I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.”

— Sherwood Anderson

46. “There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.”

— Sherwood Anderson

47. “I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.”

— Sherwood Anderson

48. “Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words.”

— Sherwood Anderson

49. “I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.”

— Sherwood Anderson

50. “The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.”

— Sherwood Anderson