Quotes from Ellen Glasgow

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em.

All change is not growth as all movement is not forward.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!

though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.