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

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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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.
Ellen Glasgow
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I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
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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Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley.
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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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.
Ellen Glasgow
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Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
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After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour
Ellen Glasgow
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No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.
Ellen Glasgow
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. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.
Ellen Glasgow
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America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.
Ellen Glasgow
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It is only in the heart that anything really happens.
Ellen Glasgow
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To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.
Ellen Glasgow
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The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
Ellen Glasgow
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Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
Ellen Glasgow
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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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I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.
Ellen Glasgow
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Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?
Ellen Glasgow
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audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.
Ellen Glasgow
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... to be literary appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.
Ellen Glasgow