Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 – November 21, 1945) was an American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South.
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.
Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.
Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.
Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.
The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
What a man marries for's hard to tell. . . an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.
What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.
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.
Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.
That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.
Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.
marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.
In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.
I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. . . . I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.
. . . 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.
Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.
The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality. . . . But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent.