Gertrude Atherton Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.

Gertrude Atherton
But they are more hysterical than the average because they have the opportunity their constituents lack, of shouting in public.

Gertrude Atherton
The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.

Gertrude Atherton
A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains...

Gertrude Atherton
The law of cause and effect does not hide in the realm of the unexpected when intelligent beings go looking for it.

Gertrude Atherton
Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

Gertrude Atherton
The average intelligence is always shallow, and in electric climates very excitable.

Gertrude Atherton
It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

Gertrude Atherton
Her imagination modeled no pleasing features upon the ugly skull of matrimony.

Gertrude Atherton
Her conversation was like a very light champagne, sparkling but not mounting to the brain.

Gertrude Atherton
Her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

Gertrude Atherton
Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

Gertrude Atherton
Orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

Gertrude Atherton
There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.

Gertrude Atherton
A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

Gertrude Atherton
An ardent feminist, he believed in women taking precisely the same liberties with orthodoxies as men had done since the beginning of time.

Gertrude Atherton
Like all great writers... he puts his best in his books, and sometimes lacks magnetism and fresh thought in talking.

Gertrude Atherton
When I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

Gertrude Atherton
If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

Gertrude Atherton
Like most Americans, he was a specialist, and had studied only that branch of his art necessary to his own interests.

Gertrude Atherton
Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.

Gertrude Atherton
Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Gertrude Atherton
Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

Gertrude Atherton
He always settled on the obvious like a hen on a porcelain egg.

Gertrude Atherton
The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.

Gertrude Atherton
Power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

Gertrude Atherton
It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.

Gertrude Atherton
The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.

Gertrude Atherton
The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.

Gertrude Atherton
He talked as if every sentence had been carefully rehearsed; every semi-colon, every comma, was in exactly the right place, and his rounded periods dropped to the floor and bounced about like tiny rubber balls.

Gertrude Atherton