Sherwood Anderson quotes

Sherwood Anderson was an influential American writer, best known for his short story collection "Winesburg, Ohio." His modernist style and focus on everyday people influenced a generation of writers. He inspired and mentored famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Here are 22 of his quotes:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

Sherwood Anderson

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

Sherwood Anderson

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

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

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

Sherwood Anderson

You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.

Sherwood Anderson

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

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

Sherwood Anderson

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

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

Sherwood Anderson

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

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?

Sherwood Anderson

Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not 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

We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then we knew we were all right.

Sherwood Anderson

The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams.

Sherwood Anderson

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose.

Sherwood Anderson

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

It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness.

Sherwood Anderson

You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard's shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "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