Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Sherwood Anderson (American Fiction Writer)

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Considered one of the great American writers, he published many novels, short story collections, volumes of poetry, and memoirs. He is noted for Winesburg, Ohio (1919,) a collection of interrelated short stories that explore a discontent with small-town life in the American Midwest.

Born in Camden, Ohio, Anderson had an uncertain childhood as a son of a day laborer. After intermittent schooling, he enlisted in the Spanish-American War, later returned to Ohio, and married. Following a nervous breakdown in 1912, he left his family and his lucrative position as the head of a paint factory to devote all his time to writing.

Settling in Chicago, Anderson joined a literary circle that included Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Edgar Lee Masters. His first novel was Windy McPherson’s Son (1916.) His best-known work is Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life (1919,) a compilation of interrelated short stories that portray the ‘secret lives’ of marginal characters and the sensibilities of the young artist who observes them and then escapes. Winesburg influenced a generation of writers, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Anderson’s subsequent books include Poor White (1920,) The Triumph of the Egg (1921,) Many Marriages (1923,) Horses and Men (1923,) and the semi-autobiographical Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926.) Anderson’s most commercially successful novel was Dark Laughter (1925,) although critics consider it a minor work.

Anderson’s Memoirs (1942) and Letters (1953) were published after his unfortunate death from peritonitis he developed after swallowing a cocktail stick.

Anderson’s autobiography is A Story Teller’s Story (1924.) The American literary and social critic Irving Howe wrote Sherwood Anderson: A Biography (1951.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Sherwood Anderson

What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Failures, Mistakes

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?
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness

I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.
Sherwood Anderson

Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: The Present

General Grant had a simple, childlike recipe for meeting life … “I am terribly afraid, but the other fellow is afraid, too”.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Fear, Anxiety

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: The Present, Life

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.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Simplicity, Simple Living

The whole object of education is, or should be, to develop mind. The mind should be a thing that works. It should be able to pass judgment on events as they arise, make decisions.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Education, Mind

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life there is purpose. … Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.
Sherwood Anderson

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. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Truth

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?
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Assurance, Confidence

It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Emotions

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