Top 100 Sherwood Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Wait and wait. Most people’s lives are spent waiting.”

— Sherwood Anderson

52. “He had always thought of himself as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out successfully.”

— Sherwood Anderson

53. “If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.”

— Sherwood Anderson

54. “People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.”

— Sherwood Anderson

55. “The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

— Sherwood Anderson

56. “Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.”

— Sherwood Anderson

57. “He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.”

— Sherwood Anderson

58. “Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.”

— Sherwood Anderson

59. “It is no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.”

— Sherwood Anderson

60. “To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. one has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship.”

— Sherwood Anderson

61. “Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,′ he had said. ‘You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

— Sherwood Anderson

62. “Don’t be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern – the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.”

— Sherwood Anderson

63. “We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.”

— Sherwood Anderson

64. “I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.”

— Sherwood Anderson

65. “Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.”

— Sherwood Anderson

66. “Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art – although it may possibly be very good journalism?”

— Sherwood Anderson

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

— Sherwood Anderson

68. “I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.”

— Sherwood Anderson

69. “It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.”

— Sherwood Anderson

70. “It was as though her woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.”

— Sherwood Anderson

71. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

72. “Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.”

— Sherwood Anderson

73. “One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.”

— Sherwood Anderson

74. “It hadn’t shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.”

— Sherwood Anderson

75. “Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.”

— Sherwood Anderson

76. “I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.”

— Sherwood Anderson

77. “Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.”

— Sherwood Anderson

78. “In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.”

— Sherwood Anderson

79. “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.”

— Sherwood Anderson

80. “What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.”

— Sherwood Anderson

81. “If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. 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

82. “Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.”

— Sherwood Anderson

83. “When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he’ll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.”

— Sherwood Anderson

84. “All of the people of my time were bound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn. They had forgotten the west winds.”

— Sherwood Anderson

85. “I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.”

— Sherwood Anderson

86. “Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?”

— Sherwood Anderson

87. “The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.”

— Sherwood Anderson

88. “If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words.”

— Sherwood Anderson

89. “Friends you have, people you love, die and are born again.”

— Sherwood Anderson

90. “I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.”

— Sherwood Anderson

91. “To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.”

— Sherwood Anderson

92. “What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well – to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it – to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?”

— Sherwood Anderson

93. “She is always pretending she loves me, but look at her now. Am I in her thoughts? Is there a tender look in her eyes? Is she dreaming of me as she walks along the streets?”

— Sherwood Anderson

94. “If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.”

— Sherwood Anderson

95. “All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child – something of that sort – gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.”

— Sherwood Anderson

96. “It might be that women who have beennurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taughtto have too much respect.”

— Sherwood Anderson

97. “Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.”

— Sherwood Anderson

98. “If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.”

— Sherwood Anderson

99. “Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.”

— Sherwood Anderson

100. “More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish?”

— Sherwood Anderson