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A little money's like a little snow, Lucy. Unless it's added to, it melts away.
Jessamyn West
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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
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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
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The words a man speaks are always more comforting than the words he hears.
Jessamyn West
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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
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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
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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
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It takes all kinds, I understand. Some want to live dangerously and some want to live.
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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.
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Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
Jessamyn West
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Cold is a tooth of silver
that bites like crimson flame,
a savage tooth of silver
that only June can tame.
Jessamyn West
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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
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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.
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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
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Bandying words with Jud Clasby would be like trying to outgrunt a pig.
Jessamyn West
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You can only write about what you don't know, and find out about it in the writing.
Jessamyn West
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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.
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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
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It is worse to have a good thing that is not true believed about you, than a bad.
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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?
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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
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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
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Did California cause any of this? No, though it does seem to draw to it people with unusual inclinations.
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Kissing was like death from lightning. If it happened, you didn't know it. And vice versa.
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I have always been better able to confront the disaster that is real than the one I imagine.
Jessamyn West
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Jessamyn West
Born:
July 18, 1902
Died:
February 23, 1984
(aged 81)
Bio:
Mary Jessamyn West was an American author of short stories and novels, notably The Friendly Persuasion. A Quaker from Indiana, she graduated from Fullerton Union High School in 1919 and Whittier College in 1923.
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