Jessamyn West Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

People who keep journals have life twice

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

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults

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

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

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

Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.

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.

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

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

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

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

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?

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

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.

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

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