Rose Macaulay Quotes

Quotes about:

• It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

  Rose Macaulay

  Philosophy, Women, Talking

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  41 Copy quote

• Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

  Rose Macaulay

  Passion, Law, Conflict

  Rose Macaulay, Constance Babington Smith (2011). “Letters to a Friend”, p.173, Bloomsbury Publishing

  13 Copy quote

• At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

  Rose Macaulay

  Life, Stress, House

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Towers of Trebizond". Book by Rose Macaulay, 1956.

  17 Copy quote

• To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

  Rose Macaulay

  Thinking, Empty Mind, Prejudice

  Rose Macaulay (1922). “Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings”

  7 Copy quote

• The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

  Rose Macaulay

  Travel, Trouble

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.5, A&C Black

  15 Copy quote

• The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

  Rose Macaulay

  Lust, Impulse, Primitive

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

  Rose Macaulay

  Food, Cooking, Culture

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

  8 Copy quote

• Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

  Rose Macaulay

  Believe, Atheism, Strange

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.) (1923). “Mystery at Geneva”

  12 Copy quote

• It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

  Rose Macaulay

  World

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.), John Hamilton Cowper Johnson (1963). “Last letters to a friend, 1952-1958”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Told by an Idiot”, p.66, A&C Black

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.) (1923). “Mystery at Geneva”

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.101, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.), Roloff Beny, Constance Babington Smith (1977). “Roloff Beny interprets in photographs Pleasure of ruins”

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.) (1940). “And No Man's Wit”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

  Rose Macaulay

  Travel, Feels, Countrymen

  5 Copy quote

• All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.

  Rose Macaulay

  Men, Profound, Honor

  8 Copy quote

Page 1 of 4

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin