Ellen Glasgow quotes:

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away."

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!

Dignity is an anachronism.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.

Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

A strange marriage that had been, though most marriages appear strange to spectators.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.

Theories have nothing to do with life ...

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ...

you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being ...

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.

Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

He who demands little gets it.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

Cruelty is the only sin.

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley.

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent....

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

you can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody.

... so long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ...

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.