Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotations

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

The greatest weapon in the world ... is ridicule.

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

because we are always staring at the stars, we learn the shortness of our arms.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

Enemies are an indication of character.

Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

Men love a joke - on the other fellow. But your really humorous woman loves a joke on herself.

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

I believe that the matter is automatically self-regulating; that those women who prefer the home and have an ability for it will eventually return to it; that others, like myself, will compromise; and that still others, temperamentally unfitted for it, will remain in the world to add to its productivity ...

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

That is the tragedy of growing old, Chris. You don't leave the world. It leaves you.

Every crucial experience can be regarded either as a setback, or the start of a wonderful new adventure, it depends on your perspective!

The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives intellect...and they move the earth. To some He allots heart...and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence...and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all has taken one color instead of many.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

There is nothing for the modern man or woman to fear about most cases of cancer. Nothing except delay.

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

Every crucial experience can be regarded as a setback - or a start of a new kind of development. [You have the responsibility to decide if you will see it as a bad setback or good start!]

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

These are times of action. Men think and then act; sometimes, indeed, they simply act.

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

The one pleasure that never palls is the pleasure of not going to church.

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

Politics is still the man's game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then--but only occasionally--one is present at some secret conference or other. But it's not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

There is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

Herbert used to say that he was as tight as the paper on the wall.

as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.

I suppose that we are only young, Chris, so long as we can forget. After that we merely remember!

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

Besides, you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a lawyer.

when knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

Used to move so much, every time the chickens saw the team put in the wagon, they'd lie down on their backs and hold their legs up to be tied!

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter ...

It's money that brings trouble. It always has and it always will.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

It was said of Miss Letitia that when money came into her possession it went out of circulation.

my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child...

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.