My Thirty Years' War: An Autobiography (Knopf, 1930, 274 pages), p. 58
“

I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines... I change everyone's coiffure — except those that please me — and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.

— Margaret Caroline Anderson

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines... I change everyone's coiffure — except those that please me — and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made." in the context of "My Thirty Years' War: An Autobiography (Knopf, 1930, 274 pages), p. 58" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Margaret Caroline Anderson" (Quotes) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Margaret Caroline Anderson

About Margaret Caroline Anderson

Margaret Caroline Anderson (November 24, 1886 – October 18, 1973) was founder and editor of the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929.