Ellen Glasgow Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen Glasgow
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.

Ellen Glasgow
Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.

Ellen Glasgow
The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.

Ellen Glasgow
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.

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

Ellen Glasgow
Henceforth she must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest — in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

Ellen Glasgow
I shouldn't mind it if I saw the admirable sweep on to success, or immortality, but always it seems to be the ordinary, the vulgar, and the average, or the lower average, that triumphs. Nothing would astonish me, after all these years, except to be understood.

Ellen Glasgow
It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

Ellen Glasgow
The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Ellen Glasgow
Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

Ellen Glasgow
The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

Ellen Glasgow
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.

Ellen Glasgow
That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

Ellen Glasgow
You can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody.

Ellen Glasgow
For what he saw was that behind the new wrongs were the old ones, and that the sinners of to-day were, perhaps, the sinned against of yesterday.

Ellen Glasgow
Did you ever stop to think that a writer will spend three years, or many more, on a book that the average reader will skim through in a few hours?

Ellen Glasgow
Irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

Ellen Glasgow
No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

Ellen Glasgow