Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop ... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture. ~ Ellen Glasgow

For my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated. ~ Ellen Glasgow

When 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 Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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

Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure. ~ Ellen Glasgow

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Surely 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 Glasgow

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of ... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The suitable is the last thing we ever want. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Theories have nothing to do with life ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success. ~ Ellen Glasgow

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The 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 Glasgow

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind. ~ Ellen Glasgow

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted. ~ Ellen Glasgow

You could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Yes, 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 Glasgow

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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

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

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs? ~ Ellen Glasgow

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens. ~ Ellen Glasgow

So long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past remained untouched. Not the old buildings, ~ Ellen Glasgow

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason. ~ Ellen Glasgow

In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out. ~ Ellen Glasgow

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings. ~ Ellen Glasgow

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Dignity is an anachronism. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Cruelty is the only sin. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease. ~ Ellen Glasgow

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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 ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe. ~ Ellen Glasgow

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion ~ Ellen Glasgow

A self-made martyr is a poor thing. ~ Ellen Glasgow

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The only differnce between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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 ~ Ellen Glasgow

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The 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 Glasgow

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The 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 Glasgow