Jessamyn West Quotes

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Round, gray, plump-jowled like a grandmother, she washed, ate, and saw to it that she and her offspring went outside for calls of nature as regularly as any privy-bound housewife. With a recipe written in cat language, she could have baked cookies or fried a chicken.

Jessamyn West
She is a gray cat, but around her eyes the fur is black, so that she looks a little like those fifteen-year-olds who believe that being Cleopatra is mostly a matter of mascara.

Jessamyn West
Reason to the lovesick was fire to the feverish. It sent them clean out of their minds.

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
The mind must move. When there is nothing to go forward to, it explores the past. The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

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
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
She intended to forgive. Not to do so would be un-Christian; but she did not intend to do so soon, nor forget how much she had to forgive.

Jessamyn West
You're not called on to like everything in this world. Nor to speak up about all you don't like.

Jessamyn West
I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

Jessamyn West
She believed in excess. How can you tell whether or not you have had enough until you've had a little too much?

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

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

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

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

Jessamyn West
It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

Jessamyn West
The emotion, the ecstasy of love, we all want, but God spare us the responsibility.

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
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
We love those we feed, not vice versa; in caring for others we nourish our own self esteem. Children are dependent upon adults. It's a craven role for a child. It's very natural to want to bite the hand that feeds you.

Jessamyn West
If God had made a woman before he made a man, that might've been the end of creation. A woman, used to having the run of the Garden, and all of its say-so to herself, might've raised Jesse with God if she'd been roused up one morning to find a rib missing, and a man there to spoil the quiet and mess up the neatness and to pounce on her in the one-flesh act.

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
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
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