Ellen Glasgow

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

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

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

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

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

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

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

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

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

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

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

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

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

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

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.