Ellen Glasgow Quotes (31 Quotes)

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.

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.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

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

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

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

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.

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

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

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

... 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.

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

I agree with every word you write, and I can prove this in no better way than by taking your advice from beginning to end.

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

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.

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

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

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

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children ... the blindness of the unpitiful these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.

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

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.

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.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

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

... 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.

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

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.