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

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.
Ellen Glasgow
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Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
Ellen Glasgow
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Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing.
Ellen Glasgow
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the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.
Ellen Glasgow
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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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There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.
Ellen Glasgow
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True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.
Ellen Glasgow
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Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
Ellen Glasgow
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I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.
Ellen Glasgow
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The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
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.
Ellen Glasgow
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Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
Ellen Glasgow
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anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.
Ellen Glasgow
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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
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women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
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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there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Ellen Glasgow
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Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Ellen Glasgow
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though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.
Ellen Glasgow
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The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.
Ellen Glasgow