Gertrude Atherton Quotes - Page 2

No loose fish enters our quiet bay.

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.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

if there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?

Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.

Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?

The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

the best of all good friends is pride.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.

Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.