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
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
—Jessamyn West
At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.
—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
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
—Jessamyn West