Top 40 Jessamyn West Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

3. “Teaching is the royal road to learning.”

— Jessamyn West

4. “Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.”

— Jessamyn West

5. “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”

— Jessamyn West

6. “People who keep journals have life twice.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

8. “To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

10. “There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

12. “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

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

— Jessamyn West

14. “The emotion, the ecstasy of love, we all want, but God spare us the responsibility.”

— Jessamyn West

15. “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

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

— Jessamyn West

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “A good time for laughing is when you can.”

— Jessamyn West

22. “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

23. “At fourteen you don’t need sickness or death for tragedy.”

— Jessamyn West

24. “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

25. “Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

27. “Some people are always thirsting for water from other people’s wells.”

— Jessamyn West

28. “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.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

31. “Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I’ve been looking for all my life.”

— Jessamyn West

32. “They darted like needles through the morning – they wove the bright May morning into a fabric strong enough to support a party.”

— Jessamyn West

33. “The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.”

— Jessamyn West

34. “Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.”

— Jessamyn West

35. “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.”

— Jessamyn West

36. “The conversation of two people remembering, if the memory is enjoyable to both, rocks on like music or lovemaking. There is a rhythm and a predictability to it that each anticipates and relishes.”

— Jessamyn West

37. “I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn’t mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.”

— Jessamyn West

38. “It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

40. “In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?”

— Jessamyn West

41. “With enough libraries, all content is free.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

43. “The source of one’s joy is also often the source of one’s sorrow.”

— Jessamyn West

44. “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.”

— Jessamyn West

45. “It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.”

— Jessamyn West

46. “Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.”

— Jessamyn West

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

— Jessamyn West

48. “In California, the first spring is in November. March only echoes.”

— Jessamyn West

49. “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