The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Jessamyn West

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

Work, Future, Past

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.

Friends, Alone, Society

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.

Writing, Past, Words

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

Memory, Will, Hold

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.

Ignorance, Young, First

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.

Appreciate, Irony

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.

self, knowledge

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

mistakes, blunders

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

helping, people

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

helping, people

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