Rose Macaulay > Quotes

“It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”
― Rose Macaulay

“Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
― Rose Macauley

“So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.”
― Rose Macaulay

“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”
― Rose Macaulay

“The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual...”
― Rose Macaulay , Mystery at Geneva

“...when the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“But how true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Or, if not wholly true, how nearly so. Therefore, I have added to most of my pleasures the little flavour of bitterness, the flaw in their perfection, the canker in the damask, the worm at the root, the fear of loss, or of satiety, the fearful risks involved in their very existence, which tang their sweetness, and mind us of their mortality and of our own, and that nothing in this world is perfect.”
― Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures

“Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.”
― Rose Macauley

“The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins

“We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.”
― Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages

“One is, after all, very adaptable; one has to be. One finds diversions; these, indeed, confront one at every turn, the world being so full of natural beauties and enchanting artifacts, of adventures and jokes and excitements and romance and remedies for grief. It is simply that a dimension has been taken out of my life, leaving it flat, not rich and rounded and alive any more, but hollow and thin and unreal, like a ghost that roves whispering about its old haunts, looking always for something that is not there.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.”
― Rose Macaulay

“He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays--cynical but hopeful.”
― Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train

“Really, there's hardly anything to say about anything. I mean, you could say it all, all that mattered, in a few sentences.”
― Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot

“It's the old who need work. They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it - making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in.”
― Rose Macaulay

“I can't think, if people want gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions. Capricious, of course, but helpful, unless one offended them. I don't know why paganism has so quite gone out in England.”
― Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

“Every war makes other wars more likely.”
― Rose Macaulay, What Not: A Prophetic Comedy

“Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation.”
― Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot

“The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belonged to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about one hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be in on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the Deep South and in California, where sects breed best.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“We mused for a while over parents. Then I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.”
― Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages

“Travelling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons.”
― Rose Macaulay

“I spent the nine days' voyage partly sketching my Turkish fellow passengers, and partly trying to learn Turkish, and after a time I was able to say, "I would like a shoe-horn," and "See how badly you have ironed my coat, you must do it again." Father Chantry-Pigg said this phrase book was little use, as it had no sentences about the Church being better than Islam...”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“I thought how the Church was meant to be a shrine of the decenies, of friendship, integrity, love of the poetry of conduct, of the flickering, guttering candles of conscience.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“Life was well enough, she thought; well enough, and a gay enough business for those who had the means to make it so, and the temperament to find it so. Life was no great matter, and nor, certainly, was death; but it was well enough. We come and we go; we are born, we live, and we die; this poor ball, thought Rome, serves us for all that; and on the whole, we make too much complaint of it, expect, one way and another, too much of it. It is, after all, but a turning ball, which has burst, for some reason unknown to science, into a curious, interesting and rather unwholesome form of animal and vegetable life. (…) Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilization, as if it mattered much, as if civilizations had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history, and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life. The brief pageant, the tiny, squalid story of human life upon this earth, has been lit, among the squalor and the greed, by amazing flashes of intelligence, of valor, of beauty, of sacrifice, of love.”
― Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot

“Still the towers of Trebizond, the fabled city, shimmer on a far horizon, gated and walled and held in a luminous enchantment. It seems that for me, and however much I must stand outside them, this must for ever be. But at the city's heart lie the pattern and the hard core, and these I can never make my own: they are too far outside my range. The pattern should perhaps be easier, the core less hard. This seems, indeed, the eternal dilemma.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“The boats were filled mostly with steerage passengers who lived in Trebizond or were visiting relations there, and the women carried great bundles and sacks full of things, but the men carried suit-cases with sharp, square corners, which helped them very much in the struggle to get on and stay on the boats, for this was very violent and intense. More than one woman got shoved overboard into the sea during the struggle, and had to be dragged out by husbands and acquaintances, but one sank too deep and had to be left, for the boat-hooks could not reach her; all we saw were the apples out of her basket bobbing on the waves. I thought that women would not stand much chance in a shipwreck, and in the struggle for the boats many might fall in the sea and be forgotten, but the children would be saved all right, for Turks love their children, even the girls.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“One mustn’t lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends, like your neighbors, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatize and dream and escape. Anyhow that seems to be the pattern.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond