Quotes By Jessamyn West

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A big iron needle stitching the country together.

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.

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.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

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

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

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

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.

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.

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

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