Quotes from Rose Macaulay

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays--cynical but hopeful.

I can't think, if people want gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions. Capricious, of course, but helpful, unless one offended them. I don't know why paganism has so quite gone out in England.

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

Travelling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons.

We mused for a while over parents. Then I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet.

Every war makes other wars more likely.

I spent the nine days' voyage partly sketching my Turkish fellow passengers, and partly trying to learn Turkish, and after a time I was able to say, "I would like a shoe-horn," and "See how badly you have ironed my coat, you must do it again." Father Chantry-Pigg said this phrase book was little use, as it had no sentences about the Church being better than Islam...

One mustn't lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends, like your neighbors, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don't dramatize and dream and escape. Anyhow that seems to be the pattern.

Still the towers of Trebizond, the fabled city, shimmer on a far horizon, gated and walled and held in a luminous enchantment. It seems that for me, and however much I must stand outside them, this must for ever be. But at the city's heart lie the pattern and the hard core, and these I can never make my own: they are too far outside my range. The pattern should perhaps be easier, the core less hard. This seems, indeed, the eternal dilemma.

I thought how the Church was meant to be a shrine of the decenies, of friendship, integrity, love of the poetry of conduct, of the flickering, guttering candles of conscience.

Denham looked at her aunt in speculative surprise. Funny, knowing a person for over a year and still thinking she couldn't let the sink get messy and discoloured.

The thing was not to get to know any of them, if possible. Once you know your neighbours, 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.

She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realizing the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savor the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next - that was life.

Potterism is worst of all in America, that great home of commerce, success and the booming of the second rate.

Reporters for the B.B.C. have such an extraordinary effect on the people they meet - wherever they go the natives sing. It seems so strange, they never do it when I am travelling, The B.B.C. oughtn't to let them, it spoils the programme. Just when you are hoping for a description of some nice place, everybody suddenly bursts out singing. Even Displaced Persons do it. And singing sounds much the same everywhere, so I switch it off.

Pigg said he was afraid that old trouts were female. "They can't all be," aunt Dot, who knew natural history and the facts of fish life, corrected him.

Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flowerbed, bright as a street in hell, - unsteady as swing-boat, silly as a drunkard's dream, tragic as a poem by Masefield… To have one's corner in it, to run here and there about the city, grinning like a dog - what more did one want?

How did the human eye so arrange for itself the lines and colors of the human creature (surely a comparatively ugly animal?) that they wavered and re-formed into this shape we have conceived to be beauty? Strange illusion!

Yes grand' mere" The clear brown eyes flickered and blinked; he looked at once apprehensive and shifty. His grandmother reflected that he knew nothing yet of what his future was to be, he was in her hands, and for a moment she felt the gratification of the power she had never had over the silent, convent-bred girl, her son's wife.

So men's will to recovery strove against the drifting wilderness to halt and tame it; but the wilderness might slip from their hands

Let's see, what are those four footling freedoms we used to hear about - freedom to eat, freedom to speak, freedom to get about - what's the other? Freedom from fear, that's it. Well, who's going to have freedom from fear with those bleeding M.P.'s snooping round after him?

Frontiers; what romance! Not all the nagging douanes and impatient queues of passengers could spoil it. Say frontier, frontier, frontier, ten times, and the word, unlike most words so treated, still retains a meaning. Love, hate, friendship, virtue, vice, God - these may become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, but frontiers remain.

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.