Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Jessamyn West
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.

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

Jessamyn West
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?

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

Jessamyn West
Kissing was like death from lightning. If it happened, you didn't know it. And vice versa.

Jessamyn West
I don't think you ought to tell yourself too many things. You've got to listen to what things tell you once in a while.

Jessamyn West
Winter could drop down out of a clear sky, sharp as an icicle, and, without a sound, pierce your heart.

Jessamyn West
There were clearly two classes of people in the world: those for whom the world was magnified and enriched in words and those who could never find the beautiful world of their living and knowing on any sheet of paper.

Jessamyn West
Joicey, trying to be reasonable, always melted Shel's heart — like a bird trying to plow, a baby wanting to pitch hay.

Jessamyn West
Her frame and features when moving, talking, feeling were like the pebbles at the bottom of the branch: not worth a glance without the living water that flowed over them.

Jessamyn West
You can only write about what you don't know, and find out about it in the writing.

Jessamyn West
Summer on the desert dies like a snake. You think it's done for, dead as a doornail, then there comes another fierce burst of life. And even that violent lashing may not be final.

Jessamyn West
All agree that it is wrong to be bound to Hollywood; though no one has suspected that the bonds, instead of money or fleshpots or easy work, might be the joys of shared effort. I give something which, though my own, becomes part of something beyond me; and Hollywood's pull for me becomes the pull felt by the member of any order.

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

Jessamyn West
It is so easy for a middle-aged person, in the presence of youth, to be deluded about his own age. The young faces are so exactly like the one he saw in his own mirror—only day before yesterday, it seems. The young, on the other hand, look into visages dull-eyed, long-toothed, wattle-necked, and chop-fallen, something they have never been and which they cannot imagine ever being.

Jessamyn West
At an age when all is known to more gifted assimilators, the plodding experiencers are still making exciting discoveries.

Jessamyn West
Cry for joy in April,
Cry for death in fall.
Birth's an open gateway,
But death's a solid wall.

Jessamyn West
Perhaps burglars are solitaries, and theft is only a sideline with them. The real high comes not from the money or the tape recorders, but from being alone where they ought not to be.

Jessamyn West
His mouth was as thin as the cutting edge of an axe and it turned down at the corners in the same way.

Jessamyn West
Letters tell you what the writer thinks of the recipient; journals tell you who the writer is.

Jessamyn West
Opal lived in her house like an egg in a shoe box, curves enhancing corners.

Jessamyn West
Solitude, like a drug, can be addictive. The more you have it, the more you want it.

Jessamyn West
The mind needs room to turn around in, and when the future doesn't provide this dimension, one chooses of necessity whatever spaciousness the past affords.

Jessamyn West