Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Ellen Glasgow
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Ellen Glasgow.
Last updated on September 20, 2024.
He knows so little and knows it so fluently.
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.
Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
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.
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
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.
Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.
The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.
What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
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.
Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.
To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.
Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.
If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.
. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.
Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.
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.
It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.
Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.
There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.
Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.
The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?
I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.
The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
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.
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.
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.
The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.
anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.
Cruelty is the only sin.
Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion
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!
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.
The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.
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.
Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.
A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.
There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.
Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.
Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.
It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.
In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.
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