Ellen Glasgow Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

In her abhorrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!

Ellen Glasgow
In her sensible way she was really attached to him, as one becomes attached to a bed, however uncomfortable, in which one has slept, or tried vainly to sleep, for more than fifty years.

Ellen Glasgow
What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life — the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being.

Ellen Glasgow
Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Ellen Glasgow
Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

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

Ellen Glasgow
To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

Ellen Glasgow
There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

Ellen Glasgow
Mrs. Bredalbane... laughed with the genial insolence which, it seemed to him, Nature had reserved for twin sisters.

Ellen Glasgow
Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.

Ellen Glasgow
It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

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

Ellen Glasgow
Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

Ellen Glasgow
Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

Ellen Glasgow
Women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

Ellen Glasgow
It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

Ellen Glasgow
That was one of the worst things about suffering; it made one indifferent and insincere.

Ellen Glasgow
I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

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

Ellen Glasgow
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.

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
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
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.

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

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
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
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
Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love'.

Ellen Glasgow