American novelist & short story writer (1876-1941)
The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Tandy", Winesburg, Ohio
In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
foreward, Mid-American Chants
There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Memoirs
Now in the midst of the broken waters of my civilization rhythm begins. Clear above the flood I raise my ringing voice. In the disorder and darkness of the night, in the wind and the washing waves, I shout to my brothers--lost in the flood.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Song of Industrial America", Mid-American Chants
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
"The Cornfields", Mid-American Chants
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.... It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Book of the Grotesque", Winesburg, Ohio
I'll be washed and ironed. I'll be washed and ironed and starched.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Queer", Winesburg, Ohio
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Chicago", Mid-American Chants
The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Sophistication", Winesburg, Ohio
It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Sherwood Anderson's Notebook
If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Teacher", Winesburg, Ohio
The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Loneliness", Winesburg, Ohio
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
A New Testament
There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
letter to his publisher, Ben Huebsch, New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio
The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Poor White
Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Paper Pills", Winesburg, Ohio
When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Poor White
I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Mother", Winesburg, Ohio
Into the cities my people had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Cornfields", Mid-American Chants
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night.... 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
"Death", Winesburg, Ohio