Sherwood Anderson

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 that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded white horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again.("Paper Pills")

I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.

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.

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.

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.

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved.

Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.

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.

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

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.

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. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. 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. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

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

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

General Grant had a simple childlike recipe for meeting life ... "I am terribly afraid but the other fellow is afraid too."

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.

Interest in the lives of others the high evaluation of these lives what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself the value he attributes to his own being?

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?