Hortense Calisher (December 20, 1911 – January 13, 2009) was an American writer of fiction and the second female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.
The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
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.
Speech isn't for agony.
I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.
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.
It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.
In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.
Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.
'Ms. ' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.
I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.
When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.
Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.
What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.
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.
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.
The novel is rescued life.
Agony without genius was gaucherie.
if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.