Margaret C. Anderson

Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim -. . . for discovery of cosmic truths - when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

My unreality is chiefly this: I have never felt much like a human being. It's a splendid feeling.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their pleasure comes from what they know. . . . But this only emphasizes the difference between the artist and the scholar.

. . . the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.

I wasn't born to be a fighter. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter.

My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.