"A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever."
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Quote collection
Jessamyn West quotes (page 1 of 3)
47 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary."
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"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."
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"It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own."
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"A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing."
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"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."
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"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."
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"A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain."
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"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."
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"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."
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"People who keep journals have life twice"
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"Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants."
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"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?"
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"I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt."
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"Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave."
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"The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness."
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"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"
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"A good time for laughing is when you can."
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"One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love."
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"You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life."
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