Jessamyn West - Life Quotes

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You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood - and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

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
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
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
Every arrival foretells a leave-taking: every birth a death. Yet each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

Jessamyn West
Summer on the desert dies like a snake. You think it's done for, dead as a doornail, then there comes another fierce burst of life. And even that violent lashing may not be final.

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
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