Ellen Glasgow Quotations

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

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.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

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.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

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.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

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 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.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

I agree with every word you write, and I can prove this in no better way than by taking your advice from beginning to end.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things that I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

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.

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.

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

I don't know how race would have affected it,

Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

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.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

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!"

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

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

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

it is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do ...

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.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

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

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

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

Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em ...

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

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

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

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.

Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

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

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ...

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

Borrowed illusions are better than none ...

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent....

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.

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 ...

Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ...

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being ...

Theories have nothing to do with life ...