Rose Macaulay
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.
Love's a disease. But curable.
Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.Collection: Beautiful
Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.Collection: Passion
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.Collection: Life
Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.Collection: Lying
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.Collection: Thinking
The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?Collection: Travel
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.Collection: Lust
Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.Collection: Tangled
We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.Collection: Sister
It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.Collection: Home
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.Collection: Fit
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.Collection: Food
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.Collection: Believe
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.Collection: World
Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.Collection: Time
To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.Collection: Ambition
Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.Collection: Time
A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.Collection: Freedom
How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.Collection: Selfish
The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.Collection: Dream
Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.Collection: Strong
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.Collection: Struggle
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.Collection: Travel
Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.Collection: Strange
If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.Collection: Winning
Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.Collection: Thinking
Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.Collection: Relationship
The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.Collection: May
the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.Collection: Civilization
Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.Collection: Beautiful
Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures; charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed, with companions of their own age and selection.Collection: Independent
Sleeping in a bed -- it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.Collection: Sleep
Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.Collection: Children
Nearly all novels are too long.Collection: Long
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?Collection: Religious
Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.Collection: Reading
They... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.Collection: Family
Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.Collection: Dream
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.Collection: Time
I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.Collection: Swimming
Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.Collection: Music
Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.Collection: Fashion
I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.Collection: Writing
When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.Collection: Food
Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.Collection: Home