Rose Macaulay Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

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 [exaggeration] should be placed by psychologists with the desire for nourishment, for safety, for self-gratifications, and for appreciation, as one of the elemental lusts of man.

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
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
Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.

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

Rose Macaulay
You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.

Rose Macaulay
He always looked up and took notice when religion was mentioned; to this family the word was like 'rats' to a dog, owing, perhaps, to their many clerical ancestors, perhaps to the fact that they were latish Victorians.

Rose Macaulay
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

Rose Macaulay
Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.

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
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