Gertrude Atherton Quotes

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

the curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.

Fame compensates for a column of wants.

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.

if there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

the best of all good friends is pride.

There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.

The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.

... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.

The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

The final result of too much routine is death in life.

The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.

There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.

... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.

If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.

Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.

The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

... France is the genius among nations.

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.

Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.

genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.