Ellen Glasgow Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

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

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

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.

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

As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"

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.

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

. . . 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.

Cruelty is the only sin.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

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

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

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

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.