Rose Macaulay Quotes.
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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.
One never feels such distaste for one’s countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. … The open mind is the empty mind.
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.
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
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.
To lunch with the important … that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
Human passions against eternal laws — that is the everlasting conflict.
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.
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.
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.
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
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.
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.
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
Love’s a disease. But curable.
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.
