Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

Jessamyn West
The tragedy of our time is not that we are so eye centered, so appearance besotted. The tragedy is that we do not know what we like until we are told by our advertisers and entertainers.

Jessamyn West
Poetry requires two readers. They need to be read aloud, to be sung, cried, bellowed; they need to be exclaimed over. Prose can be read alone, as one can eat a sandwich alone; but poetry is an intoxicant, and solitary drinking is a vice.

Jessamyn West
It is worse to have a good thing that is not true believed about you, than a bad.

Jessamyn West
And if kissing and being engaged were this inflammatory, marriage must burn clear to the bone. I wondered how flesh and blood could endure the ecstasy. How did married couples manage to look so calm and unexcited?

Jessamyn West
Dying, when you came down to it, was a job. It took planning and attention and energy — like setting up housekeeping or planting corn.

Jessamyn West
I believe, in spite of everything, we all half expected to escape. More than half expected, believed completely. Thought it would come to everyone else, but pass us by. Without us, without me, how's anything else to exist?

Jessamyn West
Did California cause any of this? No, though it does seem to draw to it people with unusual inclinations.

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

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

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

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
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
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
In her opinion a man who made the love of God and a show of goodness his paying profession got more and more professional and less and less loving and good.

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
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Jessamyn West
Sometimes you don't know that the house you live in is glass until the stone you cast comes boomeranging back. Maybe that's the actual reason you threw it. Something in you was yelling, 'I want out.' The life you saved, as well as the glass you shattered, was your own.

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
I'm a reader, not a listener. But apart from that, I do believe that what is written to be read tends to be better than what is written to be spoken.

Jessamyn West