Rose Macaulay Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

Rose Macaulay
And, as someone says somewhere, each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

Rose Macaulay
For that is what adultery is, a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined.

Rose Macaulay
Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

Rose Macaulay
A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

Rose Macaulay
The position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Rose Macaulay
They none of them threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this — animated, but collateral.

Rose Macaulay
Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Rose Macaulay
One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestations, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.

Rose Macaulay
One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.

Rose Macaulay
Is rabbit fur disgusting because it's cheap, or is it cheap because it's disgusting?

Rose Macaulay
If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

Rose Macaulay
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

Rose Macaulay
Miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.

Rose Macaulay
Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.

Rose Macaulay
One could do with a longer year — so much to do, so little done, alas.

Rose Macaulay
Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

Rose Macaulay
He always thought best while eating well too; with him, as with many others, high living and high thinking went together, or would have, only lack of the necessary financial and cerebral means precluded much practice of either.

Rose Macaulay
The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

Rose Macaulay
Denham felt the relief that follows unaccepted hospitality.

Rose Macaulay
Her children are either deceased, or following some profession abroad. I too follow professions, but at some distance behind, and seldom catch up with them.

Rose Macaulay
To lunch with the important... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

Rose Macaulay
Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.

Rose Macaulay
We cannot hide from one another: we know too much. We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

Rose Macaulay
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being.... The open mind is the empty mind.

Rose Macaulay