Gertrude Atherton Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.

Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

The only revenge worth having is success.

Nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

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.

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.

There is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.

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.

The best of all good friends is pride.

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

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.

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

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

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

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains ...

No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.

Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs

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

Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

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

Success is a great healer.

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

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 human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.

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

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.

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

Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

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

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

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

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.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices ...

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

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.

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

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