Quotes from 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
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.
—Jessamyn West
You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood—and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.
—Jessamyn West
Sex and religion are bordering states. They use the same vocabulary, share like ecstasies, and often serve as a substitute for one another.
—Jessamyn West
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
—Jessamyn West
Every arrival foretells a leave-taking, every birth a death. Yet each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.
—Jessamyn West
At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.
—Jessamyn West
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
—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 the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.
—Jessamyn West