Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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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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California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.
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The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.
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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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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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Self-admiration giveth much consolation.
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Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.
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... France is the genius among nations.
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All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.
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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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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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We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.
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The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.
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Success is a great healer.
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Stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.
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The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.
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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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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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I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.
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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 only revenge worth having is success.
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There is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.
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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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Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so.