Best 154 quotes of Ellen Glasgow on MyQuotes

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

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.

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.

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

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

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

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

Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

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

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

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!

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.

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

Borrowed illusions are better than none.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

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

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

Cruelty is the only sin.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

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

. . . 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.

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

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

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

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.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.

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

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

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.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

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.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

...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.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

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

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

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

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

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

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em.