Gertrude Atherton Quotes

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

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.

Success is a great healer.

The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal 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.

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?

There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

the only revenge worth having is success.

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.

nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

The final result of too much routine is death in life.

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.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.

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.

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.

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.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.

If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

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.

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.

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.