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

Rose Macaulay
Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

Rose Macaulay
Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.

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
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
Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.

Rose Macaulay
The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.

Rose Macaulay
Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.

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

Rose Macaulay
All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.

Rose Macaulay
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

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
He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays — cynical, but hopeful.

Rose Macaulay
Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.

Rose Macaulay
Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.

Rose Macaulay
I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.

Rose Macaulay
A primitive insurance against disaster.... That's a perversion. Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

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
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
Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures. Charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed with companions of their own age and selection.

Rose Macaulay
Human passions against eternal laws — that is the everlasting conflict.

Rose Macaulay
Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.

Rose Macaulay
Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

Rose Macaulay
Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangenesses.

Rose Macaulay
Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.

Rose Macaulay
But I mustn't bother you with this. One should consume one's own smoke.

Rose Macaulay
I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.

Rose Macaulay