Gwen Bristow > Quotes

“You are not required to start over, but you are required to keep going.”
― Gwen Bristow

“I’m not really beautiful,’ she said to herself, ‘but tonight I feel beautiful. And I look like a girl who feels beautiful.' (84)”
― Gwen Bristow, Celia Garth

“Love and hate, Miss Kendra, are not two opposite things. They're like the front of your hand and the back of it, Two sides of the same thing. They both mean, this person matters to me.”
― Gwen Bristow, Calico Palace

“Life let you have what you wanted. But life was like a storekeeper who put up a sign saying “Buy now, pay later,” and tempted you into buying so much that you were in debt for years”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“We’re the sort of people who take our own world with us wherever we go”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“If I only had a kettle and a cat here, she said to herself, I'd be a perfect picture of a useless old lady.”
― Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning

“We think olden times were simple because we know how grandpa’s problems were solved, and any problem is simple when you can look up the answer in the back of the book.”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory

“Everybody has lonely places”
― Gwen Bristow, Celia Garth

“the war was over and you had to riot in foolishness lest you remember you were dancing over a million graves. By”
― Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road

“the real trials of life are not the great tragedies. Not these, but the small vexations that come back over and over till you think that one more day like this will turn you into a screaming maniac”
― Gwen Bristow, Celia Garth

“What was the use of fighting unless you could see something ahead to fight for?”
― Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road

“Judith smiled in her quiet triumph, marveling that not until she gave up the keys had she understood that in doing so she had paid the cost of peace.”
― Gwen Bristow, Deep Summer

“it’s so easy to be a fool when one falls in love.”
― Gwen Bristow, Deep Summer

“I don’t believe this nonsense about the impossibility of falling in love but once; a woman can fall in love a dozen times, but it’s always with the same man.”
― Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road

“She had thought freedom meant simply the chance to have her own way, with no need to take the consequences of having had it. Well, she knew better now. Life was not a lot of golden adventures that cost you nothing.”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“That’s not just because we love each other , Kester. We’ve always loved each other. But I think it’s because we know now how hard it is to win this and how easy it is to risk losing it. And how terribly precious it is!”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory

“actresses. But when he got married, he told this fancy woman he was done with her, just like a high-minded man ought to do. But she wouldn’t let him go. He was her last chance, you see. She was through at the Jewel Box. Not that them girls at the Jewel Box are supposed”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“and”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory

“time Corrie May saw her more clearly than”
― Gwen Bristow, Plantation Trilogy: Deep Summer, The Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory

“and the world’s possibilities were hidden from her like the west bank of the river in an autumn fog.”
― Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road

“new”
― Gwen Bristow, Celia Garth

“I don’t trust the future. I know the here and now, but I don’t know anything else. That’s why I can’t understand all those easy promises. A man can promise that he will never beat this woman, or that he will do his best to give her food and shelter. Those things are possible. But I don’t understand how he can swear that he’ll feel certain emotions for the rest of his life. How can he know?”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“her affection was warm and solid, the sort of friendship that made no demands, but was simply there, like sunshine.”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“Clever people are entertaining and stupid ones give me such a pleasant sense of superiority.”
― Gwen Bristow, Plantation Trilogy: Deep Summer, The Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory

“How little, after all, one knew about the people one knew best”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory

“But he should have, she flung at him, when she was exhausted with waiting and rushing to the window at every sound of horses’ hoofs to see if David had come home. “You treated him like a baby!” she exclaimed. “You might have known he wouldn’t stand it.” “Will you be quiet?” Philip said without looking at her. “This isn’t easy for me either, you know.” Judith walked up and down the room. Philip stood looking out of the window. “What are you going to do?” she asked at length. “I’m going down to New Orleans,” said Philip briefly. While he was gone she forced herself to control her nervous suspense with repeated assurance that of course Philip would find him. David hadn’t money enough to get very far, and it would be like him to think it amusing”
― Gwen Bristow, Deep Summer

“that no kindly providence was going to save you from the results of what you did, and that you had better be sure of your own strength because you could never be sure of anybody else’s.”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“Why couldn’t we let each other alone? ” she asked in a low voice. “We fell in love because we were so different. Then all we did was twist and pull at each other, trying to make changes that couldn’t be made—”“I know. Why should anyone do that? Why is it that we can’t think of any higher destiny for the people we love than that they become just like ourselves?”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory

“That”
― Gwen Bristow, Jubilee Trail

“you were told the accumulated wisdom of generations who had suffered to acquire their knowledge, and you simply did not believe it. Those difficult rules might be right for other people, but as for yourself, you were going to get what you wanted. You were the center of your own universe and intended to have supremacy in it”
― Gwen Bristow, This Side of Glory