Quotes from Ellen Glasgow

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

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

The worst part of war is that so many people enjoy it.

Just words, words. I sometimes wish we had never learned how to talk.

Longing to excel, he had never even succeeded. He had been hampered by not knowing a number of things the average man took for granted; but he was hampered still more by knowing a number of other things the average man had never suspected.

A strange marriage that had been, though most marriages appear strange to spectators.

Thrown into the gutter, yet full of sense and personality. But life was that way. You couldn't tell what made personality, either in man or dog. Looking

But would the perpetual flux and reflux of individualism reduce all personality to the level of mass consciousness? Would American culture remain neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but infantile? Would the moron, instead of the meek, inherit democracy?

Love comes, love goes; but comradeship is woven of an indestructible element.

Misery has made more revolutions than either philanthropy or economics.

Why do all of us, every last one, have to go through hell to find out what we really want?' The

Nothing can ruin your life so long as you're free to get up and run away.

her temperament was not designed to encourage warmth, even—or was it especially?—in a husband.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

He who demands little gets it.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

chief. How in the world, grandmother still asked herself, had those early settlers been able to enjoy living without such simple comforts as feather beds and kettles of hot water? In fear, too, whenever they had taken time to stop and think, of the savages. Yet

Yet they also had loved life. They had loved it the more, John would tell her, because it was fugitive; they had loved it for the sake of the surprise, the danger, the brittleness of the moment.

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

The whole younger generation looks to me like a sum that doesn't add up.' Lavinia

We love from little motives, not for large reasons.

she was busily wondering how women could have survived marriage throughout the ages if knitting had not been invented,

For knitting composed the mind; knitting served the necessary means of evasion; knitting constituted not only an escape, but a tangible protection, from husbands.

he was almost repulsive, without a single redeeming trait, Asa thought, watching him as the car rolled away, but a pillar, nevertheless, of a respectable world.