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

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

Rose Macaulay

women talking philosophy

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

amusing agony beautiful

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

selfishness joy lying

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

Rose Macaulay

conflict passion law

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 speak safe

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

Rose Macaulay

stress house life

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

Rose Macaulay

trouble travel

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 sibling brother

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

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

Rose Macaulay

cooking food culture

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

tired touching home

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

Rose Macaulay

atheism strange believe

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

understood fit should

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

flower time past

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

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

Rose Macaulay

world

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

hate strong war

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

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

lunch ambition goal

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

Rose Macaulay

primitive impulse lust