Gertrude Atherton
The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.Collection: Self
All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Real
Success is a great healer.Collection: Success
The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.Collection: Mystery
I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.Collection: Book
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?Collection: Men
orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.Collection: Men
There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.Collection: Curiosity
the only revenge worth having is success.Collection: Revenge
there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.Collection: Knowledge
We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.Collection: People
nothing in life is more corroding than habit.Collection: Life Is
The final result of too much routine is death in life.Collection: Routine
Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.Collection: Mother
The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.Collection: Majority
A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.Collection: Bags
There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.Collection: Strong
Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.Collection: Morning
California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.Collection: California
The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.Collection: Art
If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.Collection: World
No loose fish enters our quiet bay.Collection: Quiet
The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.Collection: Real
Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Reality
genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.Collection: Character
her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.Collection: Age
The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.Collection: Race
stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.Collection: Fundamentals
fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.Collection: Fiction
Fame compensates for a column of wants.Collection: Want
... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.Collection: Irony
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.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Book
Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!Collection: Opportunity
Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.Collection: Baby
Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.Collection: Nursing
... France is the genius among nations.Collection: Genius
Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.Collection: Leader
[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.Collection: Portraits
In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.Collection: Men
No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.Collection: Men
I have come to the conclusion that the modern interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is something like this: I am as good as those that think themselves better and a long sight better than those who only think themselves as good.Collection: Thinking
... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.Collection: Book
It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.Collection: Men
I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.Collection: Problem
I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.Collection: California
The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.Collection: Progress
Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.Collection: Personality