perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.
— Hortense Calisher
The most thrilling Hortense Calisher quotes you will be delighted to read
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.
This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.
When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.
Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
Decades go faster toward the end of a century.
What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.
'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
The novel is rescued life.
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.
Speech isn't for agony.
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.
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.
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.
Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.
In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.
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.
But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head.
There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.
if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.