Ellen Glasgow

“I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.”

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

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

“Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.”

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

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

“A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.”

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

“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.”

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

“He knows so little and knows it so fluently.”

“I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.”

“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.”

“Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion”

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

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

“Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.”

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

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

“No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.”