Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Jessamyn West
I have always been better able to confront the disaster that is real than the one I imagine.

Jessamyn West
Letters are a cross between saying what you can't keep quiet about and what you think the recipient would like to hear.

Jessamyn West
If I had been told that Hemingway was seated at the next table, I would certainly have stared my eyes out. And perhaps been disappointed in what I saw. The best of a good writer — and Hemingway was a great one — goes into his writing. What's left over may be less than an eyeful.

Jessamyn West
Character is nothing but habit. Strong when habit is strong.

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

Jessamyn West
A movie is a guess at an echo. We guess at the reverberation of its impact upon an audience.

Jessamyn West
How anybody with one kid ever finds a chance to get another beats me. I never laid down with you in my life but some kid comes busting in.

Jessamyn West
She laid her hand across her open book feeling that the words there were so strong and beautiful that they would enter her veins through her palms and so flow to her heart.

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

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
Our three horses are as unlike as three persons. Perhaps more so, since they don't read, listen to radio or TV... They don't try to talk like Flicka, walk like Trigger, or eat like Silver.

Jessamyn West
Pity can bind you closer than love. You feel that you owe more to pity than you do to love. Love gives you joy; pity, pain. And isn't what pain says more to be trusted than what joy says?

Jessamyn West
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?

Jessamyn West
Some folk are always thirsting for water from other people's wells.

Jessamyn West
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.

Jessamyn West
Cold is a tooth of silver
that bites like crimson flame,
a savage tooth of silver
that only June can tame.

Jessamyn West
Bandying words with Jud Clasby would be like trying to outgrunt a pig.

Jessamyn West
I understand why one wants to know the names of what he loves... Naming is a kind of possessing, of caressing and fondling.

Jessamyn West
You can no more put a sense of time into a man who doesn't have it than you can put tides in a pond.

Jessamyn West
The writer must be willing, above everything else, to take chances, to risk making a fool of himself — or even to risk revealing the fact that he is a fool.

Jessamyn West
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.

Jessamyn West
The words a man speaks are always more comforting than the words he hears.

Jessamyn West
It takes all kinds, I understand. Some want to live dangerously and some want to live.

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

Jessamyn West