Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes - Page 2

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives intellect...and they move the earth. To some He allots heart...and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence...and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all has taken one color instead of many.