Ellen Glasgow Quotes

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

...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.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

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

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

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.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

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.

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

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

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

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.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

... 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.

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.

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

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

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.

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

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

Youth is always an enemy to the old.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

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

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

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.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

...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.

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

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.

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

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

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

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.