There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.
Ellen GlasgowNobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.
Ellen GlasgowSome women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.
Ellen GlasgowYes, 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 GlasgowTo drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.
Ellen GlasgowThe truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.
Ellen GlasgowOne cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.
Ellen GlasgowWhat fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.
Ellen Glasgowthe 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.
Ellen GlasgowSurely 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 GlasgowGive the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.
Ellen GlasgowWhen 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 Glasgowthere are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Ellen GlasgowApart 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 GlasgowThe government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.
Ellen GlasgowI 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 GlasgowIt is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
Ellen GlasgowMediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Ellen GlasgowThe 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.
Ellen GlasgowThere 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.
Ellen GlasgowI waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.
Ellen Glasgow