17 Jessamyn West Quotes

Jessamyn West quotes

1. 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.

2. In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?

3. 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?

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

5. I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity.

1. There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

2. Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.

3. In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

4. To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.

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

6. Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

7. I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

8. I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

9. You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

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

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

12. Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.