Jessamyn West > Quotes

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.”
― Jessamyn West

“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. ”
― Jessamyn West

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

“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.”
― Jessamyn West

“A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.”
― Jessamyn West

“Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.”
― Jessamyn West

“I have done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.”
― Jessamyn West

“People who keep journals have life twice.”
― Jessamyn West

“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.”
― Jessamyn West

“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.”
― Jessamyn West

“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.”
― Jessamyn West, Double Discovery

“Groan and forget it.”
― Jessamyn West

“If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.”
― Jessamyn West

“Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known.”
― Jessamyn West

“Some people are always thirsting for water from other people's wells.”
― Jessamyn West

“They darted like needles through the morning - they wove the bright May morning into a fabric strong enough to support a party.”
― Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion

“Life's a shock to the young. Shock to have an old man for a father instead of an angel. Shock to eat ham gravy instead of dew drops. And to like ham gravy. That's the worst shock of all. Find yourself fitting into this sorry world.”
― Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion

“The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.”
― Jessamyn West

“When she had found [another]. . .taking over the task of helping the bride she had felt a great pang, first of jealousy and anger, and finally sorrow. And the sorrow was the heavier because she knew she had brought it on herself. It came to her then that the only real pleasures in life resulted from a feeling of success in relationships with others: in being daughter, wife, mother. And she knew she had not succeeded very well in any of these lines.”
― Jessamyn West, The Witch Diggers

“Lib had been working all day at the sewing machine, running up new house-dresses for the womenfolk. When Lib launched into a long seam, she pushed the treadle so fast the whole machine rocked like a boat. The needle ate up the goods like a prairie fire eating up grass. Lib hated sewing and she didn't propose to spend any more of her life than needed to be turning out house-dresses for the female inmates of the Rock County Poor Farm. When she hit a long seam the poor Singer hummed and whined. The seams Lib sewed were saw-toothed, but they were in to stay. She sewed a firm stitch and she put the stitches far from the edge. . .when she held up one of her uneven seams for inspection, she consoled herself by saying, "It'll never be seen on a galloping horse.”
― Jessamyn West, The Witch Diggers

“In California, the first spring is in November. March only echoes.”
― Jessamyn West, Collected Stories of Jessamyn West

“Thee knows. . .dying's only half of it. Any of us hear, I hope. . .is ready to die for what he believes. If it's asked of us and can be turned to good account. I'm not one for dying, willy-nilly, thee understands. . . .It's an awful final thing, and more often and not nobody's much discommoded by it, except thyself, but there are times when it's the only answer a man can give to certain questions. Then I'm for it. But thee's not been asked such a question, now. Thee can go out on the pike. . .and thee'll be . . .as dead and just as forgotten as if thee'd tied a stone round they neck and jumped off Clifty Falls. No, Josh, dying won't turn the trick. What thee'll be asked to do now - is kill.'

The word hung in the air. A fly circled the table, loudly and slowly, and still the sound of the word was there. . . .louder than the ugly humming. It hung in the air like an open wound. Kill. In the Quaker household the word was bare and stark. Bare as in Cain and Abel's time with none of the panoply of wars and regiments and campaigns to clothe it. Kill. Kill a man. Kill thy brother. . . .”
― Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion

“Thee asked me where I'd been and how I'd fared. I've been quite a step. . . and fared mighty well the whole ways. If a man'd fared any better'n me it'd unsettled his mind. I've had two eyes and seen sights so pretty there's no words to duplicate them. I've drunk the wine of astonishment. . .standing still, gazing. I've had two feet and no better land anywhere to walk on. Green plush grass in spring, and leaves like a carpet in fall. I've smelled white clover in daytime and quenched my thirst with live spring-water. I've earned my bread in the sweat of my brow, and still do, hard-scrabble like any other man, but making out. I've had for wife the one woman I'd choose, and been free to lift my voice to God. Though mighty backward, I reckon, in making out what He's had to say to me. I've fared so well. . . .that a jot more'n I'd be crying.”
― Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion

“You can only write about what you don't know, and find out about it in the writing.”
― Jessamyn West, Collected Stories of Jessamyn West

“Roth wrote The Breast. Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast? Adams wrote Watership Down. Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? ... And those hobbits!... I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters.”
― Jessamyn West

“He survived the singing. . .he survived the collection of money for the home guard, a flag drill and a speech. . .But he did not survive a recitation by a . . .child. When she reached the lines

A man is dying in no-man's land,
Before he goes, he asks for your hand. . . .

Asa departed the rally.

He was glad to escape, but he was no happier outside than he had been inside. He was not sure where the greater sickness lay, in himself, unable by love or war to feel himself united with his neighbors, or in his neighbors, united by the cause and in the manner they were. He looked up at the stars, winter's constellations setting in the west, summer's constellations marching up the eastern sky. They had the power to calm and ease, but to take that calm and ease on the first night of so many men's deaths seemed ignoble. Endure the pain, he told himself, star love is too easy. The stars ask nothing of you. He defended himself against his own abuse. "I ask a good deal of myself. What? In God's name, what? Tell me quickly," his suffering self demanded. "To know, to understand." It was a barren defense. He got no comfort out of it. He took what comfort he could get from the stars.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“The prophetic sparkle of autumn. . . .invested the water and air of Balboa next morning. The inland garden softness of the night before was gone. The bay was still blue, and the wind-blown watery ridges looked sharp enough to draw blood. The sand glittered with minute glassy igloos.”
― Jessamyn West, A Matter of Time

“Eliza, I'm eighty years old. All my life I've been trying one way or another to do people good. Whether that was right or not, I don't know, but it comes over me now that I'm excused from all that. I loved Homer, but I tried to do him good. .. the way I see it now, that was wrong, that was where I's led astray. From now on, Eliza, I don't figure there's a thing asked of me but to love my fellow men. . . .No, Eliza, as far as I can see, there's not another thing asked of me, from this day forward.”
― Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion

“He lived where he was, began to enjoy the moment he was in, instead of fuming about the moment of departure which should have, and had not, arrived. These were his life's beatitudes, times when his own nature did not separate him from his life; when the needle of his being held steady at the very moment and place of his existence. It was his ambition to live his whole life in this way; though he had schemes and plans for everything else, he knew no way to scheme himself into such moments.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels