Gertrude Atherton Quotes

“Success is a great healer.”

“To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.”

“A woman without a past is like a fruitcake without brandy—insipid!”

“Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.”

“I beg your pardon for questioning your judgement," she said. "It is nothing to me, after all, if it proves faulty. I am not the one responsible for the Marquess of Atherton's heir and sole offspring. I am not the one who will be toppled from my pedestal if the world learns I have not only permitted but encouraged my nephew to associate with the most shocking persons. I am not the one who-""I wish you were the one who had heard of the rule Silence is Golden," he said.”

“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”

“Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs”

“The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")”

“Helplessness in the face of a child's suffering is the curse of parenthood.”

“You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might.”