Top 120 Ellen Glasgow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Dignity is an anachronism.”

— Ellen Glasgow

52. “Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?”

— Ellen Glasgow

53. “Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.”

— Ellen Glasgow

54. “I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.”

— Ellen Glasgow

55. “The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.”

— Ellen Glasgow

56. “Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.”

— Ellen Glasgow

57. “To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.”

— Ellen Glasgow

58. “Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.”

— Ellen Glasgow

59. “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.”

— Ellen Glasgow

60. “Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.”

— Ellen Glasgow

61. “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

62. “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

63. “No, one couldn’t make a revolution, one couldn’t even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.”

— Ellen Glasgow

64. “Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.”

— Ellen Glasgow

65. “I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.”

— Ellen Glasgow

66. “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

67. “It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.”

— Ellen Glasgow

68. “For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination...”

— Ellen Glasgow

69. “Happiness is a hardy annual.”

— Ellen Glasgow

70. “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

71. “Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.”

— Ellen Glasgow

72. “What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.”

— Ellen Glasgow

73. “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

74. “Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing...”

— Ellen Glasgow

75. “It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: – that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.”

— Ellen Glasgow

76. “The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.”

— Ellen Glasgow

77. “And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?”

— Ellen Glasgow

78. “Borrowed illusions are better than none...”

— Ellen Glasgow

79. “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

80. “My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.”

— Ellen Glasgow

81. “So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.”

— Ellen Glasgow

82. “Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.”

— Ellen Glasgow

83. “No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.”

— Ellen Glasgow

84. “What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life – the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being...”

— Ellen Glasgow

85. “Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy...”

— Ellen Glasgow

86. “I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.”

— Ellen Glasgow

87. “It is only in the heart that anything really happens.”

— Ellen Glasgow

88. “Theories have nothing to do with life...”

— Ellen Glasgow

89. “Doesn’t all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?”

— Ellen Glasgow

90. “The suitable is the last thing we ever want.”

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

92. “Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.”

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

94. “If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.”

— Ellen Glasgow

95. “There is a terrible loneliness in the spring...”

— Ellen Glasgow

96. “America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.”

— Ellen Glasgow

97. “I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.”

— Ellen Glasgow

98. “Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.”

— Ellen Glasgow

99. “He who demands little gets it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

100. “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