Quotes by Jessamyn West

• The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
• If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.
• Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.
• Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
• Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
• The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.
• You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.
• Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
• We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
• There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.
• The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.
• The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.
• Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.
• Teaching is the royal road to learning.
• We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?
• A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
• The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
• Groan and forget it.
• Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
• Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
• A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
• Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
• A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
• A big iron needle stitching the country together.
• If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
• I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
• In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?
• In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.
• It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
• Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.
• A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
• Success is just failure that gives your ego a little pep talk.