Best 91 quotes of Mary Roberts Rinehart on MyQuotes

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

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

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

as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.

Besides, you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a lawyer.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

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

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.

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!]

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

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

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

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

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

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

I believe that the matter is automatically self-regulating; that those women who prefer the home and have an ability for it will eventually return to it; that others, like myself, will compromise; and that still others, temperamentally unfitted for it, will remain in the world to add to its productivity.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.

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

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.

I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

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

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.

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

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

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

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

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

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

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

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

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

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

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

Men love a joke - on the other fellow. But your really humorous woman loves a joke on herself.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

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.

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

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

Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

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.

pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

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