Ellen Glasgow Quotes

153 Sourced 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.

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

Ellen Glasgow
The only difference between a rut and a grave, as someone had observed before him, is in their dimensions.

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

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

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

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 it.

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

Ellen Glasgow
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!'

Ellen Glasgow
To the land, she had given her mind and heart with the abandonment that she had found disastrous in any human relation.

Ellen Glasgow
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.

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

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

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

Ellen Glasgow
Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

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
There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.

Ellen Glasgow
Last night the stars were magnificent — Pegasus and Andromeda faced me brilliantly when I lifted my shade, so I went down and had a friendly reunion with the constellations.... I get a wonderful peace and the most exquisite pleasure from my friendship with the stars.

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

Ellen Glasgow
He's at the age when a man knows everything on earth an' generally knows it wrong.

Ellen Glasgow
And she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out of the ruins.

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
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
It was a bitter truth of experience, she perceived with sudden insight, that the shape of things returns again and again in the same pattern.

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

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
It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

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

Ellen Glasgow