Rose Macaulay Quotes

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

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.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

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.

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

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.

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.

Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.

You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.

News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.

Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

Nearly all novels are too long.

miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.

Love's a disease. But curable.

Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.

Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

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.

When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

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.

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.

One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

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.

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.

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

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.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

Nothing perhaps is strange once you have accepted life itself the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.