Ellen Gilchrist Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Ellen Gilchrist
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.

Ellen Gilchrist
Everyone in New Orleans that can afford it gets buried in mausoleums. That's one good thing about living there.

Ellen Gilchrist
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
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
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. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.

Ellen Gilchrist
Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does.

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

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