Ellen Glasgow

Human nature. I don’t like human nature, but I do like human beings.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome. . .

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion.

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

John Hersey

Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them.

A. B. Guthrie

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

Give some men a gun and something of power, and you will see them carry out orders aggressively and stupidly.

God must like to get off by Himself sometimes and caper. Must get mighty tiresome, keepin 'tally on folks and gettin' the sun up and tuckin 'it in bed and bringin' the rain on and all, and all the time actin 'stiff and proper. That surely was it, God must like to throw Himself around some and be silly if He felt like it.

I also believe in God, but I do not believe that he agrees to recklessness and indifference . . . He wants man to help himself.

Men speak on topics not be neutral as they Mnfredon, but literature and modesty and tenderness overflowing with all of them when they speak in the presence of some women . . . The men more paper, kindness and literature, while the presence of the opposite sex among them.

It's not a question of faith, but a question of reason and logic.

Conrad Richter

That’s how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that’s the way it ran. The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.

As far as the eye could reach, this lonely forest sea rolled on and on till its faint blue billows broke against an incredibly distant horizon.

But what in God's name did folks today want to make the whole world over like they were for? In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. Each had his own particular beliefs and his reasons for owning to them. Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different. Even the simple-minded were original in their own notions. They either mad you laugh or gave you pause. But folks in Americus today seemed mighty tiresome and getting more so. If you saw one, you saw most. If you heard one talk, it's likely you heard the rest. They were creacked on living like everybody else, according to the fashion, and if you were so queer and outlandish as to go your own way and do what you liked, it bothered their 'narve strings' so they were liable to lock you up in one of their newfangled asylums or take you home where they could hold you down to their way of doing...

William Inge

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

People distrust you if you don’t play the same games they do, Sonny. It’s the same after you grow up.

Oh, believe me. The greatest egos are those which are too egotistical to show just how egotistical they are.

I been talkin' with my buddy, and he thinks I'm virgin enough fer the two of us.

I’ll be darned if I’d let any man tell me whether I could bob my hair or not. Why, I wouldn’t go back to long hair now for anything. Morris says maybe I should take up smoking cigarettes now. Would you believe it, Cora? Women all over Oklahoma City are smoking cigarettes now. Isn’t that disgraceful? What in God’s name are we all coming to?

In the spring a young man’s fancy turns … pretty fancy.

Success, it seems to me, would be somewhat meaningless if the play were not a personal contribution. The author who creates only for audience consumption is only engaged in a financial enterprise.

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they’re willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

Eugene O'Neill

I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

James Agee

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.sn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

And no matter what, there's not one thing in this world *or* the next that we can do or hope or guess at or wish or pray that can change it or help it one iota. Because whatever is, is. That's all. And all there is now is to be ready for it, strong enough for it, whatever it may be. That's all. That's all that matters. It's all that matters because it's all that's possible. 

Allen Drury

Be aware that you are always invulnerable to personal attacks inspired by envy and spite.

Son, this is a Washington, D.C. kind of lie. It's when the other person knows you're lying, and also knows you know he knows.

The best thing to do now, is to do the very best you can.

International Law has never stopped men in their pursuit of conquest or revenge.

It's best to keep one's resentment to oneself.

Whatever is to come has to be faced alone and with as much strength one can muster.

You won't accomplish anything sitting around wishing. You've got to do things.

It’s starting to snow,” Kitty announced excitedly. “Do you suppose we will all be able to get back home all right? Washington gets so confused when it snows.

Let me see if I can state it for you this way, Senator,” he said slowly. “Under certain circumstances that may have existed in the past, the United States guided her actions by certain standards that had been proved to be valid for their time when those circumstances were found to exist. Now the circumstances may have changed and she may still be adhering to those standards although they no longer can be effectively or justifiably applied to the new circumstances which now confront us in which other standards may prove to be more beneficial than those of the past.

David Herbert Donald

Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln “could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together”—a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink—and Lincoln jeered that Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine was “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.

For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon.

Kansas, Lincoln responded, “I can not enter the ring on the money basis—first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was 272 words and he delivered it under three minutes. He labored on it for days. The "featured speaker," Edward Everett, rambled on for two hours. Most people don't even remember his name, never mind what he said.

Shirley Ann Grau

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every person has a ring of stories around them, a halo almost. People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls, digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and talked to me. some I've forgotten, but most I remember. And so my memory goes back before my birth.

These were our monuments, the physical signs of our passing, in the color of the door, in the screw holes and the edge marks of our sign. They held the shadow of us. Our ghosts lingered at this corner.

Our children grow old and elbow us into the grave.

Some people you can't comfort. You can only go along with their pretending and pretend yourself.

I wonder now what it was like living for four years, not wanting to, only waiting for your hold to weaken so you could finish up and leave.