Jessamyn West Quotes (36 Quotes)

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

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.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

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.

To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

If I were to join a circle of any kind, it would be one that required its members to try something new at least once a month. The new thing could be inconsequential steak for breakfast, frog hunting, walking on stilts . . . anything not ordinarily done.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

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.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

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.

Fiction is a form of writing which reveals truths that reality obscures.

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

You make what seems a simple choice choose a spouse or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a spouse or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

Delay breeds fear.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

A big iron needle stitching the country together.

Groan and forget it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

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.