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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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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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Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.
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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it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.
Ellen Glasgow
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Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
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
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Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.
Ellen Glasgow
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Youth is always an enemy to the old.
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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It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.
Ellen Glasgow
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... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.
Ellen Glasgow
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Cruelty is the only sin.
Ellen Glasgow
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It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
Ellen Glasgow
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The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
Ellen Glasgow
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Theories have nothing to do with life.
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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the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
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I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.
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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women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
Ellen Glasgow