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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.

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
Next
Realist
Become
Pessimist
Firsts
Pessimism
First
Fools
Much
Worse
Jove
Made
Early
Humorist
Things
Fool
Humorists
Born
Idealist

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.
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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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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.
Ellen Glasgow
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... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
Ellen Glasgow
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To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
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Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
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Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.
Ellen Glasgow
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Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.
Ellen Glasgow
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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
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True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.
Ellen Glasgow
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But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.
Ellen Glasgow
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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
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The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.
Ellen Glasgow
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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
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... the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
Ellen Glasgow
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The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
Ellen Glasgow
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Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.
Ellen Glasgow
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He who demands little gets it.
Ellen Glasgow
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To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
Ellen Glasgow
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Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
Ellen Glasgow