Quotes from Ellen Glasgow

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

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.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

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.

I agree with every word you write, and I can prove this in no better way than by taking your advice from beginning to end.

The only difference between a rut and a grave... is in their dimensions.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

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

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

The afternoon slipped away while we talked -- she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her -- and it was the last hour of day -- that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes -- that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

it is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself...

Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome...

Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but, for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion