Ellen Glasgow Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

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

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.

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

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

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

though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.

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

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.

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

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.

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

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

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

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

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

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.

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.

. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.