Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Happiness is a hardy annual.

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.

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.

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

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.

In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.

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.

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

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

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

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.

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.

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

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

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.

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

It is only in the heart that anything really happens.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

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.

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

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

... 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.

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

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

. . . 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.

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

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

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

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

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

He who demands little gets it.

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

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

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

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

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

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

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.

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

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.

. . . 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.

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

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