Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
Visitors to Los Angeles, then and now, were put out because the residents of Los Angeles had the inhospitable idea of building a city comfortable to live in, rather than a monument to astonish the eye of jaded travelers.

Jessamyn West
One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.

Jessamyn West
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.

Jessamyn West
I almost feel as if I am not a complete human being unless I have that pen in my hand.

Jessamyn West
We are forever in the dark about what touch means to another.... With touch, one enters at once a private and an ambiguous world.

Jessamyn West
The body's language is stronger than sounds shaped by the tongue and teeth.

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

Jessamyn West
July was the month when summer, like bread in the oven, might change color, but it would rise no higher. It was at its height.

Jessamyn West
Why do men resist putting gas in their cars until the last minute?... There's not much left in life for men to gamble about. They can gamble about the gas.

Jessamyn West
None but the lonely heart, they say, keeps a diary. None but a lonelier heart, perhaps, reads one. The diary keeper has no one to speak to; the diary reader has no one who speaks to him. The diary writer is at least talking to himself. The diary reader is listening to a man talking to himself.

Jessamyn West
The prohibition against solitude is forever. A Carry Nation rises in every person when he thinks he sees someone sneaking off to be alone. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

Jessamyn West
Suffering is also one of the ways of knowing you're alive.

Jessamyn West
Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

Jessamyn West
What's too much for the law to see is too much for the law to require.

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

Jessamyn West
Pleasure in irony, either in your own life or in what you read, is an ego trip. 'I know what others do not.'

Jessamyn West
Love is all things
Both high and low
And nothing else
Can hurt you so.

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

Jessamyn West
Almost all travel is lost on teen-agers.... The young do not discover the world. They discover themselves, and travel only interrupts their trips to the interior.

Jessamyn West
No one can be taught to be a writer. But it is possible to learn to write better.

Jessamyn West