Gertrude Atherton Quotes

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.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

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

Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.

Success is a great healer.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

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

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

the only revenge worth having is success.

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.

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

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

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

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

Fame compensates for a column of wants.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

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

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

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.

the best of all good friends is pride.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

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

her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

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

... France is the genius among nations.

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

Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

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

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

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

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.

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

No loose fish enters our quiet bay.

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.