Ellen Glasgow famous quotes

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Change #Positive #Organization

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Inspirational #Motivational #Happiness

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Birthday #Lovely #Forget The Past

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
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Rain #Bars #Golden

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Giving #Childhood #Joy

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Reality #Ideas #Flying

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!"
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Book #Writing #Night

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Women #Knitting #Trouble

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

#Dog #Men #Doe

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

#Winning #Love Is #Needs

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Women #Almighty #Enigma

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#War #Littles #Killing

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Winning #Numbers #Mediocrity

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Inspirational #Motivational #Encouraging

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Change #Stress #Humor

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Success #Independence #Credit

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Repetition #Stale

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Reality #Age #Youth

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Sacrifice #Self #Poor

it is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Men #Thinking #Persuasion

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Past #Law #May

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

#Passion #Thinking #World

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Fire #Dry #Tongue

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Ideas #Someday #Modern

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Tests #Should #Prose

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

#Eye #Reform #Might

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Principles #Littles #Too Much

convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Opportunity #Principles #Way

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

#Levels #Politics #Bears

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

#Successful #Principles #Doe

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

#Redemption #Ethics #Economy

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Eye #Comfort #Chance

you can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Cutting #Men #Blood

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

#Men #Ems #Politics

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Risk #Quality #Audacity

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Imagination #Novel

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Spring #Book #Light

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Literature #Honest #Being Honest

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

#Weather #Fiction #Literature

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

#Nature #Land #Contentment

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

#Sheep #Revolution #Status Quo

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

#Land #Truth Is #Drivers

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Humble #Apology #Example

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

#Vision #Decay #Ingredients

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

#Thinking #Looks #Speak

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Brother #Endurance #Doctrine

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Memories #Law #Longing

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

#Thinking #Two #People

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

#Believe

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

#Years #Novel

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Art #Perfection #Enough

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

#People #Trying #Nerves

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

#Decay #Surrender #Assault

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

#Might #Spirit #Isolation

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

#Morality #Originality #Wiser

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

#Depressing #Mediocrity #Way

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Two #Ordinary #Anarchy

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

#Past #Men

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Return #Impermanence #Hardest

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Design #Habit #Circumstances

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

#Romance #Literature #Innocence

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Reading #Heaven #Desire

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Courage #Culture #Youth

... 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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Life #Reality #Earth

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Fashion #Thoughtful #Thinking

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Hero #Thinking #Blessing

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Thoughtful #Thinking #History

... 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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Beauty #Mediocrity #Human Nature

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

#Writing #Character #Human Nature

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Writing #Independence

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 ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Art #Writing #Interesting

... so long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Long #Influence #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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Tired #Immature #Curiosity

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....
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Personality #World #Boundaries

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

#Hate #War #World

... 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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Art #Thinking #Psychology

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Thinking #Feminist #Intellectual

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Long #Ungrateful #Intellectual

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 ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Spring #Writing #Intellectual

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?
-- Ellen Glasgow

#War #Long #Evil

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#War #Choices #Horror

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Book #Writing #Let Me

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 ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Time #Heart #Joy

Theories have nothing to do with life ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Theory

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

#May #Surprise

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

#Long #Suffering #Able

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Stupidity #Selfishness #Stronger

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ...
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Spring #Loneliness #Terrible

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

#Sin #Pleasure #Committed

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Human Nature #Humans #Overestimate

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Men #Imagination

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

#Writing #Painful #Ends

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Lying #Mean #Long

... the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Reality #Illumination #Mind

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

#Unhappy #Affair #Enjoy

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Tragedy #Life Is #Pathos

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.
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Views #Sky #Earth

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!
-- Ellen Glasgow

#Vacuums #Hobbies #Strange

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

#Blessing #America #Track

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

#Age #Youth