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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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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
Feels
Conviction
Trumpet
Made
Judgment
Futile
Reading
Trumpets
Heaven
Imitate
Desire
Revelation
Firsts
Imitation
First
Revelations
Feel
Affected
Tolstoy

More quotes by 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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I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.
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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I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.
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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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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All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
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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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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Youth is always an enemy to the old.
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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Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
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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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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... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.
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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nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.
Ellen Glasgow
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America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.
Ellen Glasgow
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That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.
Ellen Glasgow
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The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
Ellen Glasgow