Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Ellen Glasgow - Page 3

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em.

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.

Theories have nothing to do with life.

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.

marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.

You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

So long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

He who demands little gets it.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

Dignity is an anachronism.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing.

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.