Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

There is nothing for the modern man or woman to fear about most cases of cancer. Nothing except delay.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.

Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over.

I believe that the matter is automatically self-regulating; that those women who prefer the home and have an ability for it will eventually return to it; that others, like myself, will compromise; and that still others, temperamentally unfitted for it, will remain in the world to add to its productivity.

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.

pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

The greatest weapon in the world ... is ridicule.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

Every crucial experience can be regarded either as a setback, or the start of a wonderful new adventure, it depends on your perspective!

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.

as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.

There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

The one pleasure that never palls is the pleasure of not going to church.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

There is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!

Besides, you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a lawyer.

That is the tragedy of growing old, Chris. You don't leave the world. It leaves you.

It's money that brings trouble. It always has and it always will.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

Used to move so much, every time the chickens saw the team put in the wagon, they'd lie down on their backs and hold their legs up to be tied!

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.