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.

Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

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

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

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.

Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.

the only revenge worth having is success.

Success is a great healer.

The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

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

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

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.

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

I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.

the curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

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.

No loose fish enters our quiet bay.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

the best of all good friends is pride.

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.

The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.

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?

There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.

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

I have come to the conclusion that the modern interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is something like this: I am as good as those that think themselves better and a long sight better than those who only think themselves as good.