Glenway Wescott Quotes

#1. She liked to be near him now that she had thought of a way to prove to him that life had taught her to understand and love him.

Glenway Wescott

#2. It is not love, but lack of love which is blind ...

Glenway Wescott

#3. Hugo, child, have I ever said that I loved you? Do you know that your fists are clenched? You aren't going to strike me-' She had smiled. Then he had burst into tears. He had never mentioned love either, but it had not occurred to him that it might not be identical with what they had enjoyed.

Glenway Wescott

#4. However, because death is the only absolute equality among human beings on earth, even the ignoblest and the most welcome instance of it deserves a little ceremonious thought.

Glenway Wescott

#5. If you forgive more than you can afford, you may find yourself impoverished in emotion afterward, with a lowered resistance to whatever happens after that.

Glenway Wescott

#6. People as a rule do mean much more than they understand.

Glenway Wescott

#7. Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.

Glenway Wescott

#8. Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.

Glenway Wescott

#9. New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home.

Glenway Wescott

#10. All the disappointments of our life before the war were a fool's paradise.

Glenway Wescott

#11. The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.

Glenway Wescott

#12. There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

Glenway Wescott

#13. But let us laugh carelessly like other men.
Let us be timid even among fools.
Let us knot silence around our throats.
For they would surely kill us.

Glenway Wescott

#14. In marriage, insult arises again and again; and pain has to be not only endured, but consented to; and the amount of forgiveness that it necessitates is incredible and exhausting.

Glenway Wescott

#15. Time is the nervous system of narration, whether factual or fictive. If it gets confused some of the minutiae of human nature are certain not to work, not to glow, not to strike home.

Glenway Wescott