Top 100 Ellen Glasgow Quotes
#1. We love from little motives, not for large reasons.
Ellen Glasgow
#2. Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.
Ellen Glasgow
#3. Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
Ellen Glasgow
#4. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#5. It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do ...
Ellen Glasgow
#7. Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.
Ellen Glasgow
#8. Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?
Ellen Glasgow
#9. You could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.
Ellen Glasgow
#10. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#11. The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
Ellen Glasgow
#12. I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.
Ellen Glasgow
#13. Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome ...
Ellen Glasgow
#14. The life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
Ellen Glasgow
#15. Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.
Ellen Glasgow
#16. And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?
Ellen Glasgow
#17. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#19. If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.
Ellen Glasgow
#22. A successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.
Ellen Glasgow
#23. Women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
Ellen Glasgow
#24. I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.
Ellen Glasgow
#26. It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
Ellen Glasgow
#27. To be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
Ellen Glasgow
#28. The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.
Ellen Glasgow
#29. What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
Ellen Glasgow
#30. I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
Ellen Glasgow
#31. Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
#33. Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Ellen Glasgow
#34. What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.
Ellen Glasgow
#35. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#36. Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ...
Ellen Glasgow
#37. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#38. What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.
Ellen Glasgow
#39. Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.
Ellen Glasgow
#40. Nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.
Ellen Glasgow
#41. There are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Ellen Glasgow
#42. There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.
Ellen Glasgow
#44. Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.
Ellen Glasgow
#45. I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.
Ellen Glasgow
#46. It is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself ...
Ellen Glasgow
#47. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#48. I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Ellen Glasgow
#50. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past remained untouched. Not the old buildings,
Ellen Glasgow
#51. So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.
Ellen Glasgow
#52. Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
Ellen Glasgow
#53. For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ...
Ellen Glasgow
#54. It is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.
Ellen Glasgow
#55. Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Ellen Glasgow
#56. A strange marriage that had been, though most marriages appear strange to spectators.
Ellen Glasgow
#57. Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.
Ellen Glasgow
#58. The whole younger generation looks to me like a sum that doesn't add up.' Lavinia
Ellen Glasgow
#59. Audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.
Ellen Glasgow
#60. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#61. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#62. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
Ellen Glasgow
#63. There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ...
Ellen Glasgow
#64. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#66. The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.
Ellen Glasgow
#67. Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
Ellen Glasgow
#68. Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.
Ellen Glasgow
#69. Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.
Ellen Glasgow
#70. But would the perpetual flux and reflux of individualism reduce all personality to the level of mass consciousness? Would American culture remain neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but infantile? Would the moron, instead of the meek, inherit democracy?
Ellen Glasgow
#71. I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em ...
Ellen Glasgow
#72. No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
Ellen Glasgow
#73. But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.
Ellen Glasgow
#74. It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.
Ellen Glasgow
#75. It is only in the heart that anything really happens.
Ellen Glasgow
#77. Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley.
Ellen Glasgow
#78. Convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.
Ellen Glasgow
#79. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#80. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#81. Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.
Ellen Glasgow
#82. I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.
Ellen Glasgow
#83. I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature ... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
Ellen Glasgow
#84. Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
Ellen Glasgow
#85. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#86. Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.
Ellen Glasgow
#87. Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.
Ellen Glasgow
#88. Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
Ellen Glasgow
#89. After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.
Ellen Glasgow
#90. Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
Ellen Glasgow
#91. One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world ...
Ellen Glasgow
#92. They will never again build like this, he thought. Dignity is an anachronism.
Ellen Glasgow
#93. The only differnce between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.
Ellen Glasgow
#94. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#95. It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
Ellen Glasgow
#96. I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.
Ellen Glasgow
#97. Marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.
Ellen Glasgow
#98. To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.
Ellen Glasgow
#99. Anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.
Ellen Glasgow
#100. Longing to excel, he had never even succeeded. He had been hampered by not knowing a number of things the average man took for granted; but he was hampered still more by knowing a number of other things the average man had never suspected.
Ellen Glasgow
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