110+ Ellen Glasgow Quotes On Education, Religion And Realistic

Ellen Glasgow was an American novelist who wrote about the changing culture and values of the post-Civil War South. Her works explored themes of gender, class, and race in a realistic and often critical manner. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ellen Glasgow on education, love, life.

Top 10 Ellen Glasgow Quotes

1. All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
2. 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.
3. No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
4. To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
5. All change is not growth; all movement is not forward.
6. The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
7. I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.
8. It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
9. Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
10. Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Ellen Glasgow Short Quotes

• Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
• Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
• Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
• Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
• I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
• Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.
• Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion
• Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.
• I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.
• He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Ellen Glasgow Quotes About Love

women love with their imagination and men with their senses. — Ellen Glasgow

... the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter. — Ellen Glasgow

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

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature. — Ellen Glasgow

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it. — Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow Quotes About Life

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. — Ellen Glasgow

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

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy. — Ellen Glasgow

... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth. — Ellen Glasgow

Theories have nothing to do with life. — Ellen Glasgow

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long. — Ellen Glasgow

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life. — Ellen Glasgow

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it. — Ellen Glasgow

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely. — Ellen Glasgow

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled. — Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow Quotes About Hard

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out. — Ellen Glasgow

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't. — Ellen Glasgow

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver. — Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow Famous Quotes And Sayings

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it. — Ellen Glasgow

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted -- and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers. — Ellen Glasgow

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour — Ellen Glasgow

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most. — Ellen Glasgow

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures. — Ellen Glasgow

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone. — Ellen Glasgow

The suitable is the last thing we ever want. — Ellen Glasgow

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing. — Ellen Glasgow

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality. — Ellen Glasgow

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Dignity is an anachronism. — Ellen Glasgow

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns. — Ellen Glasgow

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard. — Ellen Glasgow

The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk. — Ellen Glasgow

though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions. — Ellen Glasgow

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds. — Ellen Glasgow

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture. — Ellen Glasgow

Youth is always an enemy to the old. — Ellen Glasgow

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

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror. — Ellen Glasgow

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds. — Ellen Glasgow

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics. — Ellen Glasgow

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction. — Ellen Glasgow

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release? — Ellen Glasgow

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

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone. — Ellen Glasgow

Cruelty is the only sin. — Ellen Glasgow

In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority. — Ellen Glasgow

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy. — Ellen Glasgow

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language. — Ellen Glasgow

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded. — Ellen Glasgow

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

Borrowed illusions are better than none. — Ellen Glasgow

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface. — Ellen Glasgow

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization. — Ellen Glasgow

you can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody. — Ellen Glasgow

In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity! — Ellen Glasgow

As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!" — Ellen Glasgow

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful. — Ellen Glasgow

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering. — Ellen Glasgow

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance. — Ellen Glasgow

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie. — Ellen Glasgow

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent. — Ellen Glasgow

. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others. — Ellen Glasgow

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung. — Ellen Glasgow

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquated... To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality. — Ellen Glasgow

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth. — Ellen Glasgow

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better. — Ellen Glasgow

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

It is only in the heart that anything really happens. — Ellen Glasgow

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little. — Ellen Glasgow

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one. — Ellen Glasgow

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances. — Ellen Glasgow

Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley. — Ellen Glasgow

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design. — Ellen Glasgow

The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind. — Ellen Glasgow

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. — Ellen Glasgow

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. — Ellen Glasgow

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason. — Ellen Glasgow

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality. — Ellen Glasgow

To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger. — Ellen Glasgow

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age. — Ellen Glasgow

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me. — Ellen Glasgow

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

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write. — Ellen Glasgow

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity. — Ellen Glasgow

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. — Ellen Glasgow

Life Lessons by Ellen Glasgow

1. Ellen Glasgow's work often explores the themes of individualism and self-determination, emphasizing the importance of making one's own decisions and taking responsibility for their consequences.
2. Her novels often focus on the struggles of strong-willed individuals, emphasizing the importance of perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity.
3. By reading her work, one can learn the value of courage and self-confidence, and the importance of standing up for what one believes in, even in the face of opposition.