Quotes by Ellen Glasgow

“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.””

“...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...””

“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.””

“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.””

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

“Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion””

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

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

“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.””

“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””

“Misery has made more revolutions than either philanthropy or economics.””