242 Quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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

... so long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ...

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....

...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.

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.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

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