Jessamyn West Quotes

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

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.

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.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

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

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.

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

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

A good time for laughing is when you can.

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.

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

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.

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.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?