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idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

Ellen Glasgow

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Ellen Glasgow
Age: 71 †
Born: 1874
Born: April 22
Died: 1945
Died: November 21
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Suffragette
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Like
Brought
Coloring
Mountain
Gaudy
Passion
Idealism
Knowledge
Fades
White
Beneath
Light
Mountains
Best
Ideals
Matter
Distance
Trenchant

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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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.
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First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know) next I was a realist now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.
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No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
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It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
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irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.
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for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.
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All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
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In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.
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Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
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I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
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Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.
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1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.
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I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
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To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.
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The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.
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It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.
Ellen Glasgow