Ellen Glasgow Quotes

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

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

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!"

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.

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

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

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

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.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.

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

Theories have nothing to do with life.

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

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

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.

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

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

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

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

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

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

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

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.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

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.

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

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

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.

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.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

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.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

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

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.

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

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.

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

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

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.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

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

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

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.

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