Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over.

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives intellect...and they move the earth. To some He allots heart...and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence...and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all has taken one color instead of many.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.

That is the tragedy of growing old, Chris. You don't leave the world. It leaves you.

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

I believe that the matter is automatically self-regulating; that those women who prefer the home and have an ability for it will eventually return to it; that others, like myself, will compromise; and that still others, temperamentally unfitted for it, will remain in the world to add to its productivity.

when knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.

It's money that brings trouble. It always has and it always will.

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

Every crucial experience can be regarded either as a setback, or the start of a wonderful new adventure, it depends on your perspective!

People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

because we are always staring at the stars, we learn the shortness of our arms.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

The greatest weapon in the world ... is ridicule.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

The one pleasure that never palls is the pleasure of not going to church.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

Every crucial experience can be regarded as a setback - or a start of a new kind of development. [You have the responsibility to decide if you will see it as a bad setback or good start!]

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

Old men make wars that young men may die.