Jessamyn West Quotes
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We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?
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A big iron needle stitching the country together.
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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.
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The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
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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.
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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.
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Teaching is the royal road to learning.
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Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
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Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
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Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
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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.
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You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.
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A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
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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?
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A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
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Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.
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I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
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It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
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If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
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The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.
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The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
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In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.
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We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
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Groan and forget it.