Ellen Glasgow Quotes

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.

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 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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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.

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

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

Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past remained untouched. Not the old buildings,

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.

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.

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.

Lord! Lord! thar's such a sight of meanness in this here world that it makes a body b'lieve in Providence whether or no.

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.

the human is sometimes as inscrutable, as inexplicable, as the supernatural.

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

she had never thought of the young as needing religion, because they always had so much else. For the elderly, especially for the elderly with husbands who were even more elderly but refused to admit it, she considered faith indispensable.

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

And though excellence may be seldom or never handed down in the blood, meanness, as his mother had warned him, is a fatal inheritance. In

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

Glancing round the spacious library, where the handsome sets of books were never taken out of the formidable modern yet still Jacobean bookcases, he sighed regretfully because possessions, like the spirit of the possessor, are not incorruptible.

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

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.

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

man is not a rational animal. He may have invented many social philosophies, but he remains incurably biological.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

He who demands little gets it.

They will never again build like this, he thought. Dignity is an anachronism.

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

We love from little motives, not for large reasons.

Charlotte possessed, in reality, a mind of more than ordinary dimensions. It is true that feminine dissimulation, combined with the flattening influence of marriage, had subdued its activities; yet her rational part continued to exercise, in discreet silence, both passive intelligence and a critical faculty.

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

In retrospect it is difficult to see how the outcome of the trial could have been different. As Edmund M. Morgan, co-author of 'The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,' observed, 'every experienced judge and every experienced lawyer know [that] it is almost impossible to secure a verdict which runs counter to the settled convictions of the community.' And in the South, where, according to Ellen Glasgow, the Virginia novelist, the people never developed the habit of independent thought - 'there was, indeed, no need for thinking when everybody thought alike, or, rather, when to think differently meant to be ostracized' - dire social and economic consequences awaited those jurors who would forget tradition and ignore their fellow citizens' attitudes toward Leo Frank.

There are times when Life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for. —Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) American Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist

not the old trees, not even the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he lived.