Sherwood Anderson Quotes

The desperation meeting the silence with its unmasked wish.

There are lovers content with longing. I’m not one of them.

At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, much more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn't converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food - for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them.

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

There is only one thing I want. I would like to be seriously ill, and to hear nothing more about him for at least a week. Why doesn't something happen to me? Why do I have to go through all this? If only I had never set eyes on him!

I don't play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I'd like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I'm not.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.

Like you and your woman ain't gettin' along and you're in love. You can't sleep at nights. Your mind is on her - on whatever. You know, that's the blues. You can't hug that money at night. You can't kiss it.

I haven't had that one great love, which is good. I don't want that to be in the past - I want it to be in the future.

The thing that makes love stories work, in my opinion, in movies and novels and country & western songs, is the feeling of longing.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.

And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.

What could he mean by speaking so, as if I were always thinking that he cared for me, when I know he does not; he cannot. ... But I won't care for him. I surely am mistress enough of myself to control this wild, strange, miserable feeling

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.

Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.