Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

The operations of chemistry resemble the moving of a magic wand.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Who shall assign a limit to the wonders of creation! Where is the spot on earth, the animal, or plant, or the creature which mysteriously partakes of both their natures, which does not lay open to us unquestionable evidences of the wisdom and benevolence of God.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Her voice was heavy, throaty, expressionless. She threw it like a weapon.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
It was the throats of women that died first. With men it was the nape of the neck. It withered or it grew heavy; men wrote their lives there, where they could not see what they had written. But with women it was the throat.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
It was said of Miss Letitia that when money came into her possession it went out of circulation.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
When she looked at her hands the left one looked almost naked without her wedding ring. The finger had shrunk under it, as happens in such cases, and she herself felt shrunken.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result.... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The youth of to-day is fairly hard, Missie. Hard as to its elders; it reserves its compromises for itself.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
That sort of spiritual book-keeping which most of us call religion.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

Mary Roberts Rinehart
Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

Mary Roberts Rinehart
What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

Mary Roberts Rinehart