Ellen Glasgow: Surely the novel should be a form of art

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

Ellen Glasgow

prose tests should

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Ellen Glasgow

great-novels novel years

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

Ellen Glasgow

principles successful doe

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em.

Ellen Glasgow

ems politics men

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

Ellen Glasgow

light spring book

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

Ellen Glasgow

novel imagination

Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.

Ellen Glasgow

chance eye comfort

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.

Ellen Glasgow

mind monsters philosophy

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

Ellen Glasgow

youth age reality

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

Ellen Glasgow

passion world thinking

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

Ellen Glasgow

persuasion men thinking

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

Ellen Glasgow

innocence romance literature

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.

Ellen Glasgow

taught tragedy long

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

Ellen Glasgow

originality wiser morality

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

Ellen Glasgow

decay surrender assault

convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

Ellen Glasgow

principles opportunity way

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

Ellen Glasgow

thoughtful hero thinking

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Ellen Glasgow

thoughtful order thinking

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.

Ellen Glasgow

personality self world

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

Ellen Glasgow

immature tired curiosity

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.