Rose Macaulay famous quotes

03-17-2025

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Philosophy #Women #Talking
Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Beautiful #Agony #Amusing
Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Passion #Law #Conflict
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Life #Stress #House
Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Lying #Joy #Selfishness
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Thinking #Empty Mind #Prejudice
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Lust #Impulse #Primitive
Once you get to know your neighbors, 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.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Tangled #Safe #Speak
The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
-- Rose Macaulay

#Travel #Trouble
We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Sister #Brother #Sibling
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Fit #Should #Understood
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.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Home #Tired #Touching
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Believe #Atheism #Strange
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
-- Rose Macaulay

#World
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Food #Cooking #Culture
Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Time #Flower #Past
To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Ambition #Lunch #Goal
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.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Time #Morning #Book
How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Selfish #Compassion #Giving
The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Dream #Men #Past
A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Freedom #Hot #Austerity
Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Strong #Hate #War
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Struggle #Fall #Long
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Travel #Feels #Countrymen
Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
-- Rose Macaulay

#Strange #Accepted #Strangeness

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