Quotes from Ellen Glasgow

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

He who demands little gets it.

Cruelty is the only sin.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.

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

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

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.

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

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

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

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.

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.