Top 35 Susan Glaspell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.”

— Susan Glaspell

2. “It is through suppression that hells are formed in us.”

— Susan Glaspell

3. “We all go through the same things – it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.”

— Susan Glaspell

4. “Be the most you can be, so life will be more because you were.”

— Susan Glaspell

5. “Those who never sail stormy waters are the quickest and harshest judges of bad seamanship.”

— Susan Glaspell

6. “To cease to love – that is defeat.”

— Susan Glaspell

7. “The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn’t done any new thinking in the past ten years.”

— Susan Glaspell

8. “Im an American. Weve translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success – and thats getting Americanised.”

— Susan Glaspell

9. “Resentment opens no door and breeds no courage.”

— Susan Glaspell

10. “The facts of another’s life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.”

— Susan Glaspell

11. “I can’t think of any sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn’t help, just a little bit.”

— Susan Glaspell

12. “Not having children makes less work-but it makes a quiet house.”

— Susan Glaspell

13. “A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.”

— Susan Glaspell

14. “For nothing is so hard to hear as that which is half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one’s self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.”

— Susan Glaspell

15. “What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.”

— Susan Glaspell

16. “Strength diminishes when it seems we are spending it in vain.”

— Susan Glaspell

17. “They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of commonplace words.”

— Susan Glaspell

18. “Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men.”

— Susan Glaspell

19. “What is a clock? Something agreed upon and arbitrarily imposed upon us. Standard time. Not true time. Symbolizing the whole standardization of our lives.”

— Susan Glaspell

20. “There’s one form of immortality I like to think about. It’s that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.”

— Susan Glaspell

21. “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird – a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.”

— Susan Glaspell

22. “She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that – oh, that was thirty years ago.”

— Susan Glaspell

23. “She – come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself – real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and – fluttery.”

— Susan Glaspell

24. “You’re convinced that there was nothing important here – nothing that would point to any motive. SHERIFF: Nothing here but kitchen things.”

— Susan Glaspell

25. “What we seek we do not find – that would be too trim and tidy for so reckless and opulent a thing as life. It is something else we find.”

— Susan Glaspell

26. “I wonder if she was goin’ to quilt it or just knot it?”

— Susan Glaspell

27. “Hurts of childhood live on; in one form or other they are there to the end.”

— Susan Glaspell

28. “As I grow older, I think friendship between women is a thing to cherish.”

— Susan Glaspell

29. “I – I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road.”

— Susan Glaspell

30. “That’s the worst of a war – you have to go on hearing about it so long.”

— Susan Glaspell

31. “Some days are happy days – of themselves, as if for their own sakes. They seem to be enjoying themselves, regardless of what use may be made of them.”

— Susan Glaspell

32. “I go about in the world – free, busy, happy. Among people, I have no time to think of myself.”

— Susan Glaspell

33. “Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.”

— Susan Glaspell

34. “Even though you’ve given up a past it hasn’t given you up. It comes uninvited – and sometimes half welcome.”

— Susan Glaspell

35. “I know what stillness is.”

— Susan Glaspell

36. “Two people do not really live together until their books become one library. You have known just how to classify your own – books you have had, some of them since you were eleven years old. Strange now to have them adapting themselves to the books of some one else – these two life-histories becoming one, two pasts uniting.”

— Susan Glaspell

37. “Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.”

— Susan Glaspell

38. “I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.”

— Susan Glaspell