Rose Macaulay Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.

Rose Macaulay
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

Rose Macaulay
The superior thing... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.

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
Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.

Rose Macaulay
Life, for all its agonies... is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing... and whatever is to come after it — we shall not have this life again.

Rose Macaulay
There's one thing about freedom... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

Rose Macaulay
A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

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

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

Rose Macaulay
Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.

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

Rose Macaulay
She probably labored under the common delusion that you made things better by talking about them.

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

Rose Macaulay
Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.

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
The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost — to lie to oneself. Lying to other people — that's a small thing in comparison.

Rose Macaulay
Televiewers in this country are not on the whole an intellectual type.

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