Quotes from Mary Roberts Rinehart

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

Besides, you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a lawyer.

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

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

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

Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

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.

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.

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

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

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

There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.