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 More Quotes by Rose Macaulay More Quotes From 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 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 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 lateness punctuality illusion
