Winesburg, Ohio Quotes
"I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio."
"In those days only one other book seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure."
"By then, I had read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place in my memories."
"Naturally, I now have some changes of response: a few of the stories no longer haunt me as once they did."
"The country was then experiencing what he would later call 'a sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines.'"
"The very man who throws such words as these knows in his heart that he is also facing a wall."
"All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls."
"The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful."
"That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth."
"It was the truths that made the people grotesques."
"Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids."
"And do not let him become smart and successful either," she added vaguely.
"The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a formal thing without meaning."
"He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder and achieved more."
"Into Jesse’s mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies of God."
"Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son."
"Louise and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame."
"He was too young then to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was difficult for him not to have very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother."
"Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard, imaginative father, who did not look with favor upon her coming into the world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic."
"Louise wanted to answer every question put to the class by the teacher."
"You need not bother about the matter. I will answer all questions. For the whole class it will be easy while I am here."
"I hate books and I hate anyone who likes books."
"I want someone to love me and I want to love someone."
"I have been given these abundant crops and God has also sent me a boy who is called David."
"Perhaps I should have done this thing long ago."
"I have killed the man of God and now I will myself be a man and go into the world."
"It’s fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that?"
"I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not."
"I don’t care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him."
"He was a good man, full of tenderness for everyone."
"You’ll be hearing all sorts of stories, but you are not to believe what you hear."
"We will live like kings and won’t have to spend a penny to see the fair and horse races."
"So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath."
"I wanted to turn back within an hour after we had started."
"I went through with the thing for my own good."
"I knew also that if I didn’t go on I would be ashamed of myself."
"When I stole a lunch basket out of a farmer’s wagon I couldn’t help thinking of his children going all day without food."
"The ways of God are beyond human understanding."
"God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed."
"Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved."
"Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!"
"In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke."
"Out of my own experience I know that we, who are the ministers of God’s word, are beset by the same temptations that assail you."
"In your hour of sin raise your eyes to the skies and you will be again and again saved."
"I am going to find out about you. You wait and see."
"I smashed the glass of the window. Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist."
"In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts."
"The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."
"The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything."
"I myself must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star."
"I have missed something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me."
"She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty comes out from her and spreads over everything."
"I didn't try to paint the woman, of course. She is too beautiful to be painted."
"The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the alleyway."
"I felt that she was driving everything else away."
"I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her understand."
"He could not stand it. Of a sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the torn overcoat began to run across the field."
"Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses."
"Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable."
"The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose, was why people loved him."
"It was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught me something. I won't have to do it again. I will think more clearly after this. You see how it is."
"It was like making love, that’s what I mean," he explained. "Don’t you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange. That’s why I did it. I’m glad, too. It taught me something, that’s it, that’s what I wanted. Don’t you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see. That’s why I did it."
"Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life."
"In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them."
"I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them," he said.
"You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved in life.
"Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper’s wife talked a little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down the stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the dullness of her days."
"He knows the people in the towns along his railroad better than a city man knows the people who live in his apartment building."
"The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams."