Top 67 Rose Macaulay Quotes
#1. Sleeping in a bed
it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.
Rose Macaulay
#2. Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
Rose Macaulay
#3. Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
Rose Macaulay
#4. Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.
Rose Macaulay
#5. Human passions against eternal laws
that is the everlasting conflict.
Rose Macaulay
#6. Miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.
Rose Macaulay
#7. Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.
Rose Macaulay
#8. The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual ... Mystery at Geneva
Rose Macaulay
#9. The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
Rose Macaulay
#11. Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.
Rose Macaulay
#12. If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.
Rose Macaulay
#13. Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
Rose Macaulay
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
Rose Macaulay
#17. Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures; charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed, with companions of their own age and selection ...
Rose Macaulay
#18. The position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.
Rose Macaulay
#19. Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
Rose Macaulay
#20. Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
Rose Macaulay
#21. Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
Rose Macaulay
#22. God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.
Rose Macaulay
#23. I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.
Rose Macaulay
#24. When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
Rose Macaulay
#25. Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.
Rose Macaulay
#26. Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.
Rose Macaulay
#27. To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Rose Macaulay
#28. Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal ... unless she's really attractive.
Rose Macaulay
#29. The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.
Rose Macaulay
#30. Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.
Rose Macaulay
#31. One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.
Rose Macaulay
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.
Rose Macaulay
#35. Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.
Rose Macaulay
#36. The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
Rose Macaulay
#37. Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
Rose Macaulay
#38. The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual ...
Rose Macaulay
#39. 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
#40. Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
Rose Macaulay
#41. At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
#42. It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
Rose Macaulay
#43. They ... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.
Rose Macaulay
#44. [Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.
Rose Macaulay
#45. He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays
cynical but hopeful.
Rose Macaulay
#46. Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.
Rose Macaulay
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.
Rose Macaulay
#50. Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Rose Macaulay
#52. I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.
Rose Macaulay
#53. News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
Rose Macaulay
#54. It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
Rose Macaulay
#55. The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees; there are no obstructing walls.
Rose Macaulay
#56. One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.
Rose Macaulay
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.
Rose Macaulay
#60. The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
Rose Macaulay
#61. The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.
Rose Macaulay
#62. How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me ... his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.
Rose Macaulay
#63. What about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?
Rose Macaulay
#64. Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.
Rose Macaulay
#65. One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
Rose Macaulay
#66. It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
Rose Macaulay
#67. Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
Rose Macaulay
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