Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

There is a hard clear rationality about Quakers — and, indeed, all mysticism, which, once experienced, makes other ways appear indirect, childish, and crude.

Jessamyn West
Was Thoreau never lonely? Certainly. Where do you think writing like his comes from? Camaraderie?

Jessamyn West
Abel was a dog poisoner. It sometimes works out that way. A man wants to have some direct connection with life. If he can't bring life into being, he'll put an end to it. In that way he's not completely powerless. Some men can start it. Others can end it.

Jessamyn West
At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

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
His own hair imitated a toupee better than any toupee ever imitated hair.

Jessamyn West
We travel not to discover new lands or new people, but new selves.

Jessamyn West
They were always reading the law to her at home, which might not have been so bad if her father and mother had read from the same book.

Jessamyn West
The born traveler shouldn't be a besotted reader. Traveling interrupts reading.

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

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

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

Jessamyn West
I am sad for people who do not like to be in the sun. It's a free intoxicant.

Jessamyn West
When Opal stepped down from the wagon, she gave Hannah a hug and Hannah, who was solid, co-operated by making herself as compressible as possible. The fun in squeezing was, she knew, that something gave.

Jessamyn West
Mama enjoyed bandying words. In fact, there was scarcely anything she enjoyed more. She made up words from scratch, by combining words, by turning them upside down, by running them backward. She built word palaces. Structures came out of her mouth like Steinberg pictures: wobbly, made of material fabricated on the spot, and no more useful than a poem.

Jessamyn West
A little money's like a little snow, Lucy. Unless it's added to, it melts away.

Jessamyn West
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

Jessamyn West
When the opportunity for solitude must be stolen, as for the most part it must in large families or even in small families of one husband and one wife, it is, like stolen fruits, very sweet.

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

Jessamyn West
I think that it is terrible to want to have your cake and eat it, too. So I put my cake on a very high shelf; always being careful, however, that a tall stool is nearby.

Jessamyn West
Both Grace and I 'took on' when in pain. We were Irish. We didn't wait for the wake to wail. We wailed while we were still hurting, not leaving all the work for others after we were past helping.

Jessamyn West
Miss McManaman had gazed at Ada's face. It had every appurtenance faces have, yet it seemed primitive: an early, trial face to which, century after century, endearing and humanizing details would be added. It was a small granite face, made by a hurried man with a sharp chisel.

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

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
Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

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

Jessamyn West