Jessamyn West Quotes
-
Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.
→ -
If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.
→ -
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
→ -
One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.
→ -
A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
→ -
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
→ -
There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.
→ -
Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
→ -
I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.
→ -
We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?
→ -
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
→ -
In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?
→ -
Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life.
→ -
It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
→ -
A good time for laughing is when you can.
→ -
Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.
→ -
I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
→ -
It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.
→ -
The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
→ -
Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.
→ -
Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.
→ -
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
→ -
If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
→ -
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
→ -
I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.
→ -
You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.
→ -
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
→ -
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
→ -
Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
→ -
The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.
→
Related Authors
-
Tommy Kirk Actor -
Gary Cooper Film actor -
Irwin Shaw Playwright -
Mary Wesley Novelist -
Dorothy McGuire Actress -
Lawrence Durrell Novelist -
Gregory Peck Actor -
John Mills Actor -
William Wyler Film director -
Donald E. Westlake Writer -
Josephine Herbst Writer -
Cary Grant Film actor -
Anthony Perkins Actor -
John D. MacDonald Writer -
Rebecca West Author -
Celeste Holm Film actress -
James Stewart Film actor -
Burt Lancaster Film actor -
Leonardo Sciascia Writer -
Clark Gable Film actor