A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
– Jessamyn West
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
– Jessamyn West
Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.
– Jessamyn West
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
– Jessamyn West
Groan and forget it.
– Jessamyn West
I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
– Jessamyn West
If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.
– Jessamyn West
If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
– Jessamyn West
It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
– Jessamyn West
Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
– Jessamyn West
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
– Jessamyn West
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.
– Jessamyn West
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
– Jessamyn West
The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
– Jessamyn West
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
– Jessamyn West
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
– Jessamyn West
You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.
– Jessamyn West
It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.
– Jessamyn West
There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.
– Jessamyn West
Teaching is the royal road to learning.
– Jessamyn West
In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?
– Jessamyn West
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.