Ellen Glasgow Quotes

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

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

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

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

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

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

Dignity is an anachronism.

He who demands little gets it.

I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

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

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.

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

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.

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

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

It is only in the heart that anything really happens.

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.

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

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

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

The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

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.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

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

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

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

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

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

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.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

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