Jessamyn West Quotes
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: People, Will)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Chance, Fool, Paradise)
"Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants."
- Jessamyn West
"Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Talent, Writing)
"The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Acting, Actor)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Business, Beginning, End)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Society, Family, Enemies, Friends, Occupation, Writer, Writing)
"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Change, Facts, Want)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Communication, Fact, First, Forgetfulness, Ignorance)
"The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Joy, 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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: World)
"Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Nothing)
"Teaching is the royal road to learning."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Learning, Road, Teaching)
"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Love)
"A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Word)
"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Imagination, Work, Future, Past)
"Groan and forget it."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Forget)
"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Fiction, Reality)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Death, Faithfulness, Past, Words, Writing)
"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."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Humor, Irony, Sense, Taste)
"Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Nature, Memory, Will)
"A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Nothing)
"A big iron needle stitching the country together."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Country)
"If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Baby, Old, Want)
"I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Honesty, Harm, Hurt, Trying)
"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?"
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Time, Man, Want, Woman)
"In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Animals, Children)
"It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Mistakes)
"Justice is a terrible but necessary thing."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Justice)
"A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Love, Religious)