Firsts Quotes by Hortense Calisher

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand.…

— Hortense Calisher

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what…

— Hortense Calisher

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

— Hortense Calisher

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

— Hortense Calisher

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

— Hortense Calisher

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…

— Hortense Calisher

Speech isn't for agony.

— Hortense Calisher

When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world.

— Hortense Calisher

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

— Hortense Calisher

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

— Hortense Calisher

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

— Hortense Calisher

The novel is rescued life.

— Hortense Calisher