Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Gertrude Atherton

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.

Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!

Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.

Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.

the only revenge worth having is success.

Success is a great healer.

The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.

The final result of too much routine is death in life.

A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

No loose fish enters our quiet bay.

The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.

there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.

genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.

It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.

her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.

Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Fame compensates for a column of wants.

Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.

the best of all good friends is pride.

The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.

To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.