Winesburg, Ohio quotes

It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young.

He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth.

No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight.

And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him.

Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques.

All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques.

The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter.

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands.

Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner.

Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth.

He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness.

In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity.

In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church.

The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed.

Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows.

Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them.

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away.

The hotel was unprofitable and forever on the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. He thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and done for.

The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a hotel should be.

As he went spruce and businesslike through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. “Damn such a life, damn it!”

In the boyish figure she yearned to see something half forgotten that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned that.

“Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you,” she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook.

Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back,” she declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it.

After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat.

It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the silence made them both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening train came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and down upon a board sidewalk.

He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes.

The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard. It began when George had been working for a year on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor’s own making.

It lies in fact in my character, which has, if you think about it, many strange turns. Why I want to talk to you of the matter I don’t know. I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes.

I have a desire to make you admire me, that’s a fact.

I don’t know why. That’s why I talk. It’s very amusing, eh?”

“Feed me what you wish for that,” he said laughing. “Use up food that you wouldn’t otherwise sell. It makes no difference to me. I am a man of distinction, you see. Why should I concern myself with what I eat.”

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere.

Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth.

If things went well they went well for Jesse and never for the people who were his dependents. Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong.

He could master others but he could not master himself.

The running of the farm as it had never been run before was easy for him. When he came home from Cleveland where he had been in school, he shut himself off from all of his people and began to make plans.

He had brown curly hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and uncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature. His mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child.

Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer.

Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out of life and he did not know what he wanted.

In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full.

Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever.

The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.

The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley that had kept the people in the house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by the presence of the girl Louise was apparently swept away by the coming of the boy.

It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.

The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all the valley of Wine Creek, and who had wanted God to send him a sign of approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think …

The story of Louise Bentley, who became Mrs. John Hardy and lived with her husband in a brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg, is a story of misunderstanding.

Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made livable, much will have to be done.

Thoughtful books will have to be written and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.

She was afraid that if she did not do the thing at once her courage would fail. In the note she tried to be quite definite about what she wanted.

“I want someone to love me and I want to love someone,” she wrote.

“If you are the one for me I want you to come into the orchard at night and make a noise under my window. It will be easy for me to crawl down over the shed and come to you.

His name was Joe Welling, and his father had been a man of some dignity in the community, a lawyer, and a member of the state legislature at Columbus. Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike anyone else in town.

He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire.

No, he wasn’t like that—he was like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes …

Men watched him with eyes in which lurked amusement tempered by alarm. They were waiting for him to break forth, preparing to flee. Although the seizures that came upon him were harmless enough, they could not be laughed away. They were overwhelming.

Astride an idea, Joe was overmastering.

His personality became gigantic. It overrode the man to whom he talked, swept him away, swept all away, all who stood within sound of his voice.

Decay you see is always going on. It doesn’t stop. Water and paint can’t stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That’s fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way.

Just say in big letters ‘The World Is On Fire.’ That will make ’em look up.

They’ll say you’re a smart one. I don’t care. I don’t envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. You got to admit that.”

Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a refrain.

“Why doesn’t something happen? Why am I left here alone?” she muttered.

Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or any other man.

“Why doesn’t something happen? Why am I left here alone?” she muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or any other man.

She wanted to be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her.

And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure. It frightened and confused her. She had come home from the store at nine and found the house empty.

Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed Griffith’s saloon, and after drinking unbelievable quantities of beer staggered off to his room in the New Willard House and to his bed for the night.

Wash Williams was a man of courage. A thing had happened to him that made him hate life, and he hated it wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet.

First of all, he hated women. “Bitches,” he called them. His feeling toward men was somewhat different. He pitied them. “Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or another?” he asked.

Wash Williams talked in low even tones that made his words seem the more terrible. In the darkness the young reporter found himself imagining that he sat on the railroad ties beside a comely young man with black hair and black shining eyes.

There was something almost beautiful in the voice of Wash Williams, the hideous, telling his story of hate.

The telegraph operator of Winesburg, sitting in the darkness on the railroad ties, had become a poet. Hatred had raised him to that elevation. “It is because I saw you kissing the lips of that Belle Carpenter that I tell you my story,” he said.

The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. “Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted,” he said. “There is something else.

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”

His glance again wandered away to the darkened street. “I know about her, although she has never crossed my path,” he said softly. “I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one.

Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman.

I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to be loved.

Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile.

It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get.

”

He kissed them ecstatically. “Be Tandy, little one,” he pleaded. “Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.

Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy.

”

“

I am a poor stick and that will never really happen to me,

” he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit up his features. “Oh well, I suppose I’m doing well enough,” he added philosophically.

“The ways of God are beyond human understanding,” he cried, running in quickly and closing the door. He began to advance upon the young man, his eyes glowing and his voice ringing with fervor. “I have found the light,” he cried. “

After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me in the body of a woman.

” His voice dropped and he began to whisper. “I did not understand,” he said. “What I took to be a trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit.

“I am delivered. Have no fear.” He held up a bleeding fist for the young man to see. “I smashed the glass of the window,” he cried. “Now it will have to be wholly replaced.

The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist.

”

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank. He did not sleep.

By years of practice he had trained himself to sit for hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake.

In the morning he was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.

At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman. Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with blotches that indicated ill health.

Alone in the night in the winter streets she was lovely.

Her back was straight, her shoulders square, and her features were as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening.

On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto Cellini. That time they laughed.

What a bragging, blustering, brave, lovable fellow she made of the old artist!

Concerning him also she invented anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a room above Cellini’s lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys guffaw.

Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been very adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in the schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought within her.

Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in her mind.

The people of the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own way thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make and mar their own lives.

In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked to the door.

She was a teacher but she was also a woman.

As she looked at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took possession of her.

He studied French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind he planned to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the masters there, but that never turned out.

Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson.

He could draw well enough and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development.

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington Square and was long and narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that fixed in your mind.

The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends. There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends. There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists.

Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked.

They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked.

They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a corner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike eyes stared about!

Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best.

He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.

Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-bone people with his hands. Days passed when his room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind.

Enoch told George Willard about it one night. He wanted to talk to someone, and he chose the young newspaper reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when the younger man was in a mood to understand.

Youthful sadness, young man’s sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the year’s end, opened the lips of the old man.

The sadness was in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but it appealed to Enoch Robinson.

For a month his mother had been very ill and that had something to do with his sadness, but not much.

He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.

Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that extended out over the sidewalk before Voight’s wagon shop on Maumee Street just off the main street of Winesburg.

I followed her about. I talked and talked and then all of a sudden things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she did understand. Maybe she had understood all the time. I was furious. I couldn’t stand it.

I wanted her to understand but, don’t you see, I couldn’t let her understand.

I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see. That’s how it is. I don’t know why.”

The old man’s voice broke and he shook his head. “Things went to smash,” he said quietly and sadly. “Out she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out.

She took all of my people away.

They all went out through the door after her. That’s the way it was.”

George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson’s room. In the darkness by the window, as he went through the door, he could hear the thin old voice whimpering and complaining. “I’m alone, all alone here,” said the voice. “

It was warm and friendly in my room but now I’m all alone.

”

Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was tall and strong.

When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists.

She worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store.

“The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts. 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.

In my little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”

Beside the store an alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and down.

The store itself was indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything and nothing.

In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and beside the black mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and dirty in their wooden …

A thought came to him and his voice dropped. “I’m a coward too, eh?” he muttered. “Do you know why I came clear out here afoot? I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell.

I hunted out another queer one, you see.

I ran away, that’s what I did. I couldn’t stand up to someone like that George Willard. I had to come to you. I ought to tell him and I will.”

… incident quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his foolish courage.

Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.

But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray’s story.

He was thinking of that afternoon and how it had affected his whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him. He had forgotten about Hal and muttered words. “

Tricked by Gad, that’s what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of,

” he said in a low voice.

What about it, eh? What about marriage and all that?” he asked and then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he too was in an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. “Has a fellow got to do it?” he asked. “

Has he got to be harnessed up and driven through life like a horse?

”

When he came to the fence at the edge of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he wanted.

Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of what happened to him.

It was almost dark when he got to the fence and he put his hands on the top bar and stood staring. Hal Winters jumped a ditch and coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and laughed.

As he went some memory of pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the tumbledown house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he muttered words. “

It’s just as well. Whatever I told him would have been a lie,

” he said softly, and then his form also disappeared into the darkness of the fields.

He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.

In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.

He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.

Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the lawyer’s office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled clean she lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together. “

When you get ready to die then I will die also,

” she said to the boy lying on the floor beside her chair.

The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter Tom slept in it. He thought his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied with the way life in Winesburg had turned out for him.

The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose, was why people loved him.

In Hern’s Grocery they would be roasting coffee on Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store.

“Well,” he said softly, “I don’t know how it was. I was happy. You see how that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did too. I wanted to suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do.

I wanted to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong.

I thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn’t work. They all hurt someone else.”

He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. “

I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,

” he said. “I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair.

In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and forth. The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. “

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.

The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. “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.

If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

“What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what the girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.

It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage.

When father went to sleep I leaned out of the window and thought of the life I had led. I didn’t want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me.

I was impatient. Thoughts came and I wanted to get away from my thoughts. I began to beat the horse. The black clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever.

I wanted to get out of town, out of my clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything.

I almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I fell and hurt my side.

I almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I fell and hurt my side.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

Don’t you see, dear, how it was?”

The mustache had begun to turn grey and Tom colored it with dye. There was oil in the preparation he used for the purpose and the tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed away by his hand, formed a fine mist-like vapor.

In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter weather.

George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother’s death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes, went along the hallway and into the room where the body lay.

He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother’s death.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens;

He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling.

With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.

If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand.

He wants, most of all, understanding.

When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker’s daughter. Always he had been conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into manhood.

… and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.

The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village.

The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village.

He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about.