Jessamyn West Quotes

33 quotes in 357 categories

• 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…
• Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
• It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
• A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
• 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…
• A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
• A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
• Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
• 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…
• The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
• Groan and forget it.
• A big iron needle stitching the country together.
• Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
• Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.
• Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

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