Quotes by Rose Macaulay

“You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.”

“He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays -- cynical but hopeful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?”

“The great and recurrent question about abroad is, is it worth getting there?”

“`Take my camel, dear, said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

“Loves a disease. But curable.”

“A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it! Again as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciation of the day.”

The ascendancy over mens 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.

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.

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.

Nothing perhaps is strange once you have accepted life itself the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

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.

Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself to keep ones head above the accumulations the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over steadily almost irresistibly like falling snow.