Ellen Gilchrist > Quotes

“All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“That's great," Katie said. "Actually, it's revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time, you're the first woman I ever knew that could. Maybe you're the missing link, Amanda."

Maybe you ought to get a job for the 'Ladies Home Journal.' They like simplistic shit like that.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“نقش: كل ما عليك عمله لتعليم طفل هو أن تعلمه القراءة وتتركه ، أي شئ غير ذلك فهو غسيل مخ …!!
(إيلين جيلكرست)
All you have to do to educate a child is leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest is brainwashing.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“We live at the level of our language.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“Once a man I was leaving told me I could go if I would leave my skin behind. I was so young I didn't even know that I was wonderful..”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Courts of Love: Stories

“We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. -Mexico”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

“She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

“It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

“Maybe I only think everyone wants to be a writer because the friends I naturally choose are people who love books. People who love books sooner or later dream of writing them. It's a natural response to stimuli.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

“The way you start writing is by writing. Over and over again I have proven this to myself but I always forget it the next time. I always believe that I will never write again. The first time I finished a book a painter was visiting me. Her name is Ginny Stanford and her wonderful paintings have been the covers for nine of my books.
'I'll never write again,' I told her ... 'That's it ... It's over. It was great while it lasted, but now it's done.'
That afternoon she made me a wonderful drawing of a ship sinking in the waves of the sea. 'I'll never write again,' it said on the bottom of the picture. 'September, 1981.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

“The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Acts of God

“By the time the class ended I was back into an optimistic mood about their work. They were learning, they were working, it takes time, the muse will come if she is summoned.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

“I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

“Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don't let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children in grocery stores. I love to watch them work on their mothers to get what they want, and, because I am always a child, I'm pulling for them to get the candy and to get it NOW. The other day I watched a little blond beauty pull her mother's face to her and lay her hands on her mother's cheeks and kiss her nose. Needless to say they opened the bag of cookies then and there.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

“I’m not interesting. I’m a cliché inside a self-fulfilling prophecy inside a stereotype. I just let it happen. I don’t fight it. I’m too busy being alive.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Acts of God: Stories

“What he could not see was how the weak destroy the strong within a family as well as in larger worlds. This happens in every family. It is as inevitable as the sun and rain. All the daughter wanted to know was how to keep it from happening to her.”
― Ellen Gilchrist, Flights of Angels: Stories