Rose Macaulay Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

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.

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

You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?

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

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.