Rose Macaulay

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history,…

— Rose Macaulay

miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in…

— Rose Macaulay

The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small…

— Rose Macaulay

Love is a disease. But curable.

— Rose Macaulay

Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

— Rose Macaulay

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the…

— Rose Macaulay

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

— Rose Macaulay

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

— Rose Macaulay

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

— Rose Macaulay

Love's a disease. But curable.

— Rose Macaulay

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

— Rose Macaulay

“But how true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Or, if not wholly true,…

— Rose Macaulay

The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin…

— Rose Macaulay

Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and…

— Rose Macaulay

One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And…

— Rose Macaulay

Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I…

— Rose Macaulay

“He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays--cynical but hopeful.”

— Rose Macaulay

“I can't think, if people want gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and…

— Rose Macaulay

Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

— Rose Macaulay

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

— Rose Macaulay

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

— Rose Macaulay

How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish…

— Rose Macaulay

Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career…

— Rose Macaulay

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

— Rose Macaulay

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

— Rose Macaulay