Ellen Glasgow Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.

Ellen Glasgow
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.

Ellen Glasgow
The life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.

Ellen Glasgow
The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success — the true success so different from the ephemeral — is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.

Ellen Glasgow
So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

Ellen Glasgow
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.

Ellen Glasgow
A successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

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

Ellen Glasgow
In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.

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

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

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

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
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
The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few intense joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

Ellen Glasgow
The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

Ellen Glasgow
To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.

Ellen Glasgow
It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: — that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

Ellen Glasgow
No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

Ellen Glasgow