A Story Teller's Story Quotes

“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.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish?”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well―to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it―to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn't their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That's what I'm after.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“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.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“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.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“In the world of fancy even the most base man's actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“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.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story