Ellen Glasgow Quotes & Sayings

To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger. — Ellen Glasgow

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write. — Ellen Glasgow

Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror. — Ellen Glasgow

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist. — Ellen Glasgow

I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded. — Ellen Glasgow

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them. — Ellen Glasgow

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy. — Ellen Glasgow

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

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing. — Ellen Glasgow

And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature? — Ellen Glasgow

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions. — Ellen Glasgow

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age. — Ellen Glasgow

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language. — Ellen Glasgow

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material? — Ellen Glasgow

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely. — Ellen Glasgow

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

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth. — Ellen Glasgow

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction. — Ellen Glasgow

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering. — Ellen Glasgow

Anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart. — Ellen Glasgow

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature ... I would write of characters, not of characteristics. — Ellen Glasgow

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver. — Ellen Glasgow

Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity. — Ellen Glasgow

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother. — Ellen Glasgow

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness. — Ellen Glasgow

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it. — Ellen Glasgow

I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order. — Ellen Glasgow

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar. — Ellen Glasgow

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had. — Ellen Glasgow

The afternoon slipped away while we talked
she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her
and it was the last hour of day
that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes
that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house. — Ellen Glasgow

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

This rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others. — Ellen Glasgow

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease. — Ellen Glasgow

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead. — Ellen Glasgow

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release? — Ellen Glasgow

We love from little motives, not for large reasons. — Ellen Glasgow

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out. — Ellen Glasgow

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit. — Ellen Glasgow

It is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality. — Ellen Glasgow

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long. — Ellen Glasgow

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature. — Ellen Glasgow

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth. — Ellen Glasgow

The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth. — Ellen Glasgow

Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley. — Ellen Glasgow

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. — Ellen Glasgow

He who demands little gets it. — Ellen Glasgow

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love. — Ellen Glasgow

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. — Ellen Glasgow

Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none. — Ellen Glasgow

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile. — Ellen Glasgow

So long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ... — Ellen Glasgow

For my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated. — Ellen Glasgow

Irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay. — Ellen Glasgow

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

A self-made martyr is a poor thing. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

Youth is always an enemy to the old ... — Ellen Glasgow

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature. — Ellen Glasgow

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality. — Ellen Glasgow

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface. — Ellen Glasgow

The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung. — Ellen Glasgow

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome ... — Ellen Glasgow

The old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent. — Ellen Glasgow

A strange marriage that had been, though most marriages appear strange to spectators. — Ellen Glasgow

Women love with their imagination and men with their senses. — Ellen Glasgow

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

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 — Ellen Glasgow

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting. — Ellen Glasgow

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt. — Ellen Glasgow

It is only in the heart that anything really happens. — Ellen Glasgow

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds. — Ellen Glasgow

To be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life. — Ellen Glasgow

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated. — Ellen Glasgow

Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings. — Ellen Glasgow

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace. — Ellen Glasgow

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality. — Ellen Glasgow

Dignity is an anachronism. — Ellen Glasgow

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity. — Ellen Glasgow

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad. — Ellen Glasgow

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being ... — Ellen Glasgow

Cruelty is the only sin. — Ellen Glasgow

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens. — Ellen Glasgow

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Audacity is of all qualities the most youthful. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of ... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces. — Ellen Glasgow

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature. — Ellen Glasgow

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me. — Ellen Glasgow

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

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one. — Ellen Glasgow