Best 23 quotes of Hortense Calisher on MyQuotes

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

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.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.

if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

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.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Speech isn't for agony.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.