Quotes from Gwen Bristow

We always hate the school room where we learn hard lessons. But then we love it, because that's the school that taught us all we know, and gave us all the strength we have.

We can get the new world we want, if we want it enough to abandon our prejudices, every day, everywhere. We can build this world if we practice now what we said we were fighting for.

The rich and powerful want to believe in their right to be rich and powerful, so they justify it by saying they are inherently superior to the poor and lowly.

No human being can destroy the structure of a marriage except the two who made it. It is the one human edifice that is impregnable except from within.

You are not required to start over, but you are required to keep going.

I'm not really beautiful,' she said to herself, 'but tonight I feel beautiful. And I look like a girl who feels beautiful.' (84)

Love and hate, Miss Kendra, are not two opposite things. They're like the front of your hand and the back of it, Two sides of the same thing. They both mean, this person matters to me.

We think olden times were simple because we know how grandpa's problems were solved, and any problem is simple when you can look up the answer in the back of the book.

Everybody has lonely places

the real trials of life are not the great tragedies. Not these, but the small vexations that come back over and over till you think that one more day like this will turn you into a screaming maniac

Life let you have what you wanted. But life was like a storekeeper who put up a sign saying "Buy now, pay later," and tempted you into buying so much that you were in debt for years

We're the sort of people who take our own world with us wherever we go

the war was over and you had to riot in foolishness lest you remember you were dancing over a million graves. By

What was the use of fighting unless you could see something ahead to fight for?

I don't believe this nonsense about the impossibility of falling in love but once; a woman can fall in love a dozen times, but it's always with the same man.

it's so easy to be a fool when one falls in love.

Judith smiled in her quiet triumph, marveling that not until she gave up the keys had she understood that in doing so she had paid the cost of peace.

her affection was warm and solid, the sort of friendship that made no demands, but was simply there, like sunshine.

time Corrie May saw her more clearly than

I don't trust the future. I know the here and now, but I don't know anything else. That's why I can't understand all those easy promises. A man can promise that he will never beat this woman, or that he will do his best to give her food and shelter. Those things are possible. But I don't understand how he can swear that he'll feel certain emotions for the rest of his life. How can he know?

and the world's possibilities were hidden from her like the west bank of the river in an autumn fog.

actresses. But when he got married, he told this fancy woman he was done with her, just like a high-minded man ought to do. But she wouldn't let him go. He was her last chance, you see. She was through at the Jewel Box. Not that them girls at the Jewel Box are supposed

How little, after all, one knew about the people one knew best

you were told the accumulated wisdom of generations who had suffered to acquire their knowledge, and you simply did not believe it. Those difficult rules might be right for other people, but as for yourself, you were going to get what you wanted. You were the center of your own universe and intended to have supremacy in it