Rose Macaulay Quotes
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One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.
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News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
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Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.
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[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.
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One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.
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The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
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Sleeping in a bed -- it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.
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I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.
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As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
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Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
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miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.
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Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.
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Love's a disease. But curable.
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Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.
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God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.
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We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
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I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.
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When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
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Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.
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Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
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Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
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the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.
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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.
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As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.
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Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
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Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.
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Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
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Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
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Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
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