Quotes from Jessamyn West

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

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.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

People who keep journals have life twice

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

A good time for laughing is when you can.

To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

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 rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

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.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

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?

Teaching is the royal road to learning.