Jessamyn West Quotes

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

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.

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.

People who keep journals have life twice

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?

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

A good time for laughing is when you can.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

The emotion, the ecstasy of love, we all want, but God spare us the responsibility.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

Some people are always thirsting for water from other people's wells.

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.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

With enough libraries, all content is free.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

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.

To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.

Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life.

Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

The conversation of two people remembering, if the memory is enjoyable to both, rocks on like music or lovemaking. There is a rhythm and a predictability to it that each anticipates and relishes.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Suffering is also one of the ways of knowing you're alive.

Talent is helpful in writing but guts are absolutely necessary.

Groan and forget it.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes. It takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

If you want a baby have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes. It takes more gut and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

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.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.