Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Ellen Glasgow - Page 2

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

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.

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

It is only in the heart that anything really happens.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

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.

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.

... 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.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

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.

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

... 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.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

Borrowed illusions are better than none.

... 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.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent.

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"

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.

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.