Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879-1944) was an American writer, born in Brockton, Massachusetts, and educated at Radcliffe College.
She was a reader in English at Bryn Mawr, 1901-10. Mrs. Gerould was criticized as weighing down a distinct literary talent with an unbending conservatism, which though it did not attract the masses, had a coterie of faithful admirers. In addition to many articles in magazines she published:
- Vain Obligations (1914)
- The Great Tradition (1915)
- Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions (1916)
- A Change of Air (1917)
- Modes and Morals (1919), a collection of essays
- Valiant Dust (1923), a collection of short stories
Famous quotes by katharine fullerton gerould:
“You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“I positively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not going to rub my shoulder against a heart. What are hearts doing on sleeves?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)