Ellen Glasgow

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

. . . 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.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern; no idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.

All change is not growth; all movement is not forward.