Jessamyn West Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

Jessamyn West
Christmas, like love, was a mystery. Time and again it might disappoint, but like love only the promises of the Christmas to come, never the disappointments of those past, seemed real.

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

Jessamyn West
Applause is nothing compared with laughter. Anyone can clap hands, and the mind be miles away. A laugh comes right from the center. No wonder comedians love their audiences.

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

Jessamyn West
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor—for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

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
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
When death threatens, when a good-bye is faced, how one searches the past for images, begins to shoal up the past for future use.

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

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

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
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

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
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
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
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
Everett was chiefly a romanticist, and I chiefly a sentimentalist. One looks to the future; the other to the past; and the present, on the unlikely chance that both ever happen to be in it at the same time, is, under such circumstances, foredoomed to be disappointing.

Jessamyn West
'Here's Pete, Junior, your son and heir,' Doc had said, and held up something that looked like a slippery fish in a wig.

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

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
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