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

- Hortense Calisher

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

- Hortense Calisher

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

- Hortense Calisher

The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

- Hortense Calisher

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

- Hortense Calisher

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

- 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 we never…

- Hortense Calisher

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

- Hortense Calisher

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

- Hortense Calisher