Top 100 Ellen Glasgow Quotes
#1. 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
#3. There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.
Ellen Glasgow
#4. There are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Ellen Glasgow
#5. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#6. Nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.
Ellen Glasgow
#7. Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.
Ellen Glasgow
#8. There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.
Ellen Glasgow
#9. Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.
Ellen Glasgow
#10. What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.
Ellen Glasgow
#11. 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
#12. Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.
Ellen Glasgow
#13. Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ...
Ellen Glasgow
#14. Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.
Ellen Glasgow
#15. What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.
Ellen Glasgow
#16. 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!
Ellen Glasgow
#17. Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Ellen Glasgow
#19. Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.
Ellen Glasgow
#20. Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
#21. It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.
Ellen Glasgow
#22. To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
Ellen Glasgow
#23. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#24. All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
Ellen Glasgow
#25. 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
#26. For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ...
Ellen Glasgow
#27. 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
#28. Audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.
Ellen Glasgow
#29. The whole younger generation looks to me like a sum that doesn't add up.' Lavinia
Ellen Glasgow
#30. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#31. 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 ...
Ellen Glasgow
#32. Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.
Ellen Glasgow
#33. Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.
Ellen Glasgow
#34. A strange marriage that had been, though most marriages appear strange to spectators.
Ellen Glasgow
#35. Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Ellen Glasgow
#36. It is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.
Ellen Glasgow
#37. A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.
Ellen Glasgow
#38. Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion
Ellen Glasgow
#39. What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
Ellen Glasgow
#40. Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
Ellen Glasgow
#42. I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.
Ellen Glasgow
#43. So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.
Ellen Glasgow
#44. 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
#45. Irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.
Ellen Glasgow
#47. I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Ellen Glasgow
#48. 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
#49. It is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself ...
Ellen Glasgow
#50. 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
#51. Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.
Ellen Glasgow
#52. Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.
Ellen Glasgow
#53. The life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
Ellen Glasgow
#54. The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.
Ellen Glasgow
#55. To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.
Ellen Glasgow
#56. 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
#57. But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.
Ellen Glasgow
#58. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#59. I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.
Ellen Glasgow
#60. The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
Ellen Glasgow
#61. 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
#62. You could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.
Ellen Glasgow
#63. Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?
Ellen Glasgow
#64. Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.
Ellen Glasgow
#66. It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do ...
Ellen Glasgow
#67. Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
Ellen Glasgow
#68. 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
#69. Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
Ellen Glasgow
#70. Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.
Ellen Glasgow
#71. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#72. No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.
Ellen Glasgow
#73. The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.
Ellen Glasgow
#74. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
#75. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#76. Though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.
Ellen Glasgow
#77. 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.
Ellen Glasgow
#78. Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.
Ellen Glasgow
#79. The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.
Ellen Glasgow
#80. The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.
Ellen Glasgow
#81. To be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
Ellen Glasgow
#82. It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
Ellen Glasgow
#84. Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
Ellen Glasgow
#85. Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.
Ellen Glasgow
#86. I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.
Ellen Glasgow
#87. Women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
Ellen Glasgow
#88. A successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.
Ellen Glasgow
#89. We love from little motives, not for large reasons.
Ellen Glasgow
#92. That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.
Ellen Glasgow
#93. She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.
Ellen Glasgow
#95. If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.
Ellen Glasgow
#96. I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.
Ellen Glasgow
#97. Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
Ellen Glasgow
#99. 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
#100. And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?
Ellen Glasgow
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