Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut.

having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

Every crucial experience can be regarded either as a setback, or the start of a wonderful new adventure, it depends on your perspective!

when knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

It's money that brings trouble. It always has and it always will.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

Enemies are an indication of character.

Every crucial experience can be regarded as a setback - or a start of a new kind of development. [You have the responsibility to decide if you will see it as a bad setback or good start!]

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives intellect...and they move the earth. To some He allots heart...and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence...and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all has taken one color instead of many.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

That is the tragedy of growing old, Chris. You don't leave the world. It leaves you.

my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

It was said of Miss Letitia that when money came into her possession it went out of circulation.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

because we are always staring at the stars, we learn the shortness of our arms.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.