Ellen Glasgow Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

Though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.

Ellen Glasgow
Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

Ellen Glasgow
There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.

Ellen Glasgow
It is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

Ellen Glasgow
Molly was in the mood when the need to talk — to let oneself go — is so great that the choice of a listener is little more than an accident.

Ellen Glasgow
If I eat lobster, and if I don't eat lobster, I shall regret it.

Ellen Glasgow
I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.

Ellen Glasgow
And I am simply delighted that you have a Springer spaniel. That is the perfect final touch to our friendship. Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs.

Ellen Glasgow
I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

Ellen Glasgow
Spring was running in a thin green flame over the Valley.

Ellen Glasgow
Nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

Ellen Glasgow
We didn't talk so much about happiness in my day. When it came, we were grateful for it, and, I suppose, a little went farther than it does nowadays. We may have been all wrong in our ideas, but we were brought up to think other things more important than happiness.

Ellen Glasgow
He went on endlessly, overcome by the facile volubility of a weak nature.

Ellen Glasgow
Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

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

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

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

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

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