Rose Macaulay

The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so…

— Rose Macaulay

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be…

— Rose Macaulay

Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae…

— Rose Macaulay

They... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions…

— Rose Macaulay

Sleeping in a bed -- it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels…

— Rose Macaulay

Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously…

— Rose Macaulay

Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ...…

— Rose Macaulay

Nearly all novels are too long.

— Rose Macaulay

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations…

— Rose Macaulay

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this…

— Rose Macaulay

God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

— Rose Macaulay

One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

— Rose Macaulay

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

— Rose Macaulay

When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

— Rose Macaulay

Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus…

— Rose Macaulay

Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of…

— Rose Macaulay

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

— Rose Macaulay

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is…

— Rose Macaulay

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and…

— Rose Macaulay

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep…

— Rose Macaulay

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself,…

— Rose Macaulay

Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right…

— Rose Macaulay

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

— Rose Macaulay

How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing,…

— Rose Macaulay

Only one hour in a day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep,…

— Rose Macaulay