Ellen Glasgow Quotes

All change is not growth as all movement is not forward.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

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.

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

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

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

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

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

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

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

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

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

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.

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

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

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

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.

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

though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.

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

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

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

Cruelty is the only sin.

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

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

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

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

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

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

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

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

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

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.

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.

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

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

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

Dignity is an anachronism.

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.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.

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