Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Roberts Rinehart - Page 2

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

There is nothing for the modern man or woman to fear about most cases of cancer. Nothing except delay.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

Men love a joke - on the other fellow. But your really humorous woman loves a joke on herself.

There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

These are times of action. Men think and then act; sometimes, indeed, they simply act.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.

I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

Besides, you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a lawyer.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

Herbert used to say that he was as tight as the paper on the wall.

Used to move so much, every time the chickens saw the team put in the wagon, they'd lie down on their backs and hold their legs up to be tied!

Politics is still the man's game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then--but only occasionally--one is present at some secret conference or other. But it's not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

It was said of Miss Letitia that when money came into her possession it went out of circulation.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

I suppose that we are only young, Chris, so long as we can forget. After that we merely remember!

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger.

Enemies are an indication of character.

Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

There is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.