Jessamyn West's Quotes

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

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

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

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.

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.

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 reveals truths that reality obscures.

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.

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

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

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

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.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

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.

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

Groan and forget it.

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 their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

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

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

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

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 big iron needle stitching the country together.

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