Ellen Glasgow Quotes - Page 4

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

Borrowed illusions are better than none.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

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.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

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

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

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

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

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.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

... 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.

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.

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.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.