Jessamyn West

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

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

“I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.”

“The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.”

“A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.”

“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.”

“In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.”

“Groan and forget it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.”

“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.”

“A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.”

“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?”

“We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?”

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

“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.”

“Teaching is the royal road to learning.”

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

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