Life & Wisdom Quote by Jessamyn West

West’s line lands with the quiet cruelty of a truism you recognize too late: physical damage is finite, but verbal harm has no clean timeline. The sentence is engineered as a comparison that looks comforting on arrival (bones heal), then swerves into something more unsettling (words don’t). That pivot is the intent. It reframes “just words” as a category error, a way people launder responsibility after causing real injury.

The subtext hinges on power. A broken bone is visible, diagnosable, treatable; it recruits sympathy and a clear protocol for repair. A wound opened by language is private, deniable, and endlessly re-litigated in the mind. West is pointing at the asymmetry between harm and proof: the speaker can move on, the listener has to live with the replay. “Fester” is the key verb, making psychological pain bodily and unsanitary, something that spreads when neglected. It also suggests that time alone doesn’t heal; time can worsen. What festers is not only the insult but the silence around it, the lack of apology, the social pressure to “be over it.”

Context matters: West wrote in a century marked by war rhetoric, political scapegoating, and domestic codes that prized niceness while tolerating emotional violence. Her work often circles Quaker-inflected moral seriousness, where language is an ethical act, not decoration. The line argues for accountability in speech without sanctimony: if you can fracture someone with a sentence, you don’t get to plead invisibility as an alibi.