Ellen Glasgow
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.Collection: Success
It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.Collection: Birthday
Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.Collection: Women
What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.Collection: Wisdom
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?Collection: Experience
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.Collection: Change
The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.
Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
He knows so little and knows it so fluently.
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.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.
There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.
To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.
There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.Collection: Strong
He who demands little gets it.Collection: Demand
It is only in the heart that anything really happens.Collection: Heart
Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.Collection: Principles
It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.Collection: Human Nature
Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.Collection: Long
I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.Collection: Believe
There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.Collection: Spring
Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.Collection: Happiness
to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.Collection: Literature
The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.Collection: War
women love with their imagination and men with their senses.Collection: Men
Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.Collection: Dream
The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.Collection: Return
A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.Collection: Long
No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.Collection: Gratitude
What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.Collection: Hate
Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.Collection: People
She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.Collection: Memories
As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. 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!"Collection: Book
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.Collection: Corn
To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.Collection: Drinking
...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.Collection: Tired
For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.Collection: Imagination
To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Distance
Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.Collection: Giving
I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.Collection: Humanity
The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.Collection: Spring
Theories have nothing to do with life.Collection: Theory