Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
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Self-admiration giveth much consolation.
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Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.
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Stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.
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The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
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Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.
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California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.
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Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.
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The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.
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All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.
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Success is a great healer.
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The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.
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Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?
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The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.
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Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.
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No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.
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... France is the genius among nations.
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Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.
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There is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.
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There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.
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A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?
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Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.
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The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.
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It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.