Top 120 Ellen Glasgow Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn’t need it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow

106. “O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!”

— Ellen Glasgow

107. “I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into ’em...”

— Ellen Glasgow

108. “To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.”

— Ellen Glasgow

109. “What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.”

— Ellen Glasgow

110. “Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.”

— Ellen Glasgow

111. “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.”

— Ellen Glasgow

112. “In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.”

— Ellen Glasgow

113. “Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.”

— Ellen Glasgow

114. “There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.”

— Ellen Glasgow

115. “Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.”

— Ellen Glasgow

116. “Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.”

— Ellen Glasgow

117. “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

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

— Ellen Glasgow

119. “Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.”

— Ellen Glasgow

120. “Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.”

— Ellen Glasgow

121. “Women are one of the Almighty’s enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.”

— Ellen Glasgow

122. “But youth isn’t happy. Youth is sadder than age.”

— Ellen Glasgow

123. “Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.”

— Ellen Glasgow

124. “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.”

— Ellen Glasgow

125. “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

126. “That was the worst of being poor, you couldn’t give the right things in sickness.”

— Ellen Glasgow

127. “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

128. “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

129. “Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.”

— Ellen Glasgow

130. “Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.”

— Ellen Glasgow

131. “Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.”

— Ellen Glasgow

132. “Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.”

— Ellen Glasgow

133. “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

134. “Surely the novel should be a form of art – but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.”

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Ellen Glasgow