Mary Jessamyn West was an American Quaker (originally from Indiana) who wrote numerous stories and novels, notably The Friendly Persuasion (1945). She graduated from Fullerton Union High School in 1919 and Whittier College in 1923. There she helped found the Palmer Society, in 1921.
Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written / told by Jessamyn, under the main topics: Humor - Imagination - History.
"Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary"
"Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants"
"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"
"Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave"
"Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract"
"Justice is a terrible but necessary thing"
"It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own"
"In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults"
"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?"
"If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one"
"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"
"I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt"
"Groan and forget it"
"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures"
"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"
"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"
"A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain"
"A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing"
"A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever"
"A big iron needle stitching the country together"
"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"
"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions"
"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"
"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"
"The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness"
"The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow"
"The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate"
"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future"
"The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting"
