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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Denham looked at her aunt in speculative surprise. Funny, knowing a person for over a year and still thinking she couldn't let the sink get messy and discoloured.”
― Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train

“Rain began, as it does in central and northern France. The skies were overcast; the south lay behind. The people at the stations were no longer Latins, happy and idle, but Gauls, worried and industrious, the world’s busiest workers, thriftiest savers, hardest haters, and best bureaucrats. Their talk was sharp and quick; they would stand no nonsense; one could imagine that it was they who had first conceived passports, to prevent the world’s denizens from moving about their planet as they chose.”
― Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train

“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

“The thing was not to get to know any of them, if possible. Once you know your neighbours, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.”
― Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train

“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 most industrious way to ensure having a really good time in Portugal has always been to have a shot at translating some Portuguese literature, preferably Camoens, before your visit. This pleases the Portuguese, an amiable and generous people, irrespective of the merits of the translation, which are usually not remarkable.”
― Rose Macaulay, They Went To Portugal