Ellen Gilchrist Quotes & Sayings

One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old. — Ellen Gilchrist

Having your work honored nationally is a great morale booster. — Ellen Gilchrist

Work is the thing that stays. Work is the thing that sees us through. — Ellen Gilchrist

Dance in the fullness of time. — Ellen Gilchrist

It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night. — Ellen Gilchrist

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will? — Ellen Gilchrist

She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway. — Ellen Gilchrist

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other. — Ellen Gilchrist

The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace. — Ellen Gilchrist

We live at the level of our language. — Ellen Gilchrist

Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way. — Ellen Gilchrist

How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen. — Ellen Gilchrist

I can't conceive of nursing babies and taking care of children and writing, too. I know there are writers that do that, but I'm too single-minded. I can't stand to be interrupted, whether I'm writing a story or dressing a child. — Ellen Gilchrist

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down. — Ellen Gilchrist

Once a man I was leaving told me I could go if I would leave my skin behind. I was so young I didn't even know that I was wonderful.. — Ellen Gilchrist

I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed. — Ellen Gilchrist

My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends. — Ellen Gilchrist

I love 'E.R.' and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It makes me know I did not waste my life after all by not becoming a medical doctor. — Ellen Gilchrist

My ancestors are Highland Scots, and my father's home in north Alabama is so much like northwest Arkansas. I have the same allergies in both places. — Ellen Gilchrist

The way you start writing is by writing. Over and over again I have proven this to myself but I always forget it the next time. I always believe that I will never write again. The first time I finished a book a painter was visiting me. Her name is Ginny Stanford and her wonderful paintings have been the covers for nine of my books.
'I'll never write again,' I told her ... 'That's it ... It's over. It was great while it lasted, but now it's done.'
That afternoon she made me a wonderful drawing of a ship sinking in the waves of the sea. 'I'll never write again,' it said on the bottom of the picture. 'September, 1981. — Ellen Gilchrist

Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don't let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children in grocery stores. I love to watch them work on their mothers to get what they want, and, because I am always a child, I'm pulling for them to get the candy and to get it NOW. The other day I watched a little blond beauty pull her mother's face to her and lay her hands on her mother's cheeks and kiss her nose. Needless to say they opened the bag of cookies then and there. — Ellen Gilchrist

All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing. — Ellen Gilchrist

In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess. — Ellen Gilchrist

Don't ruin the present with the ruined past. — Ellen Gilchrist

My childhood is in my brother's house, and I like to visit there and be reminded. — Ellen Gilchrist

We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. -Mexico — Ellen Gilchrist

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone. — Ellen Gilchrist

That's great," Katie said. "Actually, it's revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time, you're the first woman I ever knew that could. Maybe you're the missing link, Amanda."
Maybe you ought to get a job for the 'Ladies Home Journal.' They like simplistic shit like that. — Ellen Gilchrist

Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook. — Ellen Gilchrist

I never thought it was unusual to write, and I've been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school. — Ellen Gilchrist

I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys. — Ellen Gilchrist

The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then. — Ellen Gilchrist

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him. — Ellen Gilchrist

Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape — Ellen Gilchrist

At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do. — Ellen Gilchrist

A piece of writing is the product of a series of explosions in the mind. — Ellen Gilchrist

I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer. — Ellen Gilchrist

The first thing a writer has to do is find a new source of income. — Ellen Gilchrist

I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine. — Ellen Gilchrist

Maybe I only think everyone wants to be a writer because the friends I naturally choose are people who love books. People who love books sooner or later dream of writing them. It's a natural response to stimuli. — Ellen Gilchrist

The human race is just getting started ... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years. — Ellen Gilchrist

I love New York, but I wish they wouldn't put clothes on their dogs. — Ellen Gilchrist

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore. — Ellen Gilchrist

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky. — Ellen Gilchrist