Daily Inspiration Quote by Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow’s line is a velvet-gloved rebuke to melodrama: life may be brutal, but our posture toward it can either sharpen the blade or dull it. Coming from a novelist who chronicled the grit of the post-Reconstruction South, this isn’t the airy “positive thinking” of a self-help aisle. It’s an ethic forged in a world where women, especially, were expected to endure catastrophe with manners intact. The sentence quietly relocates power. If you can’t control the facts, you can still control the frame.

The craft is in the compact bargain the quote offers. Glasgow doesn’t deny hardship; she refuses to romanticize it. “So hard” concedes the full weight of suffering, then pivots to “the way you take it,” a phrase that makes endurance sound almost like taste. That’s the subtext: pain is real, but drama is optional. The modern ear might bristle at the implication that difficulty is partly a failure of attitude, yet Glasgow’s point is subtler. She’s arguing for agency where agency is scarce, a psychological tool when social tools are limited.

Context matters because Glasgow lived through rapid upheaval: industrial change, shifting gender expectations, the long hangover of a defeated region. Her fiction often dissected the illusions people used to survive. This quote does the same in miniature. It’s not consolation; it’s strategy. Take life one way and you turn misfortune into identity. Take it another and you keep misfortune in its place: awful, but not omnipotent.