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The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Jessamyn West

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Jessamyn West
Age: 81 †
Born: 1902
Born: July 18
Died: 1984
Died: February 22
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indiana
United States
Mary Jessamyn West
Work
Much
Really
Imagination
Almost
Future
History
Past

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You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.
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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.
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Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.
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With enough libraries, all content is free.
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Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.
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A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
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Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
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The conversation of two people remembering, if the memory is enjoyable to both, rocks on like music or lovemaking. There is a rhythm and a predictability to it that each anticipates and relishes.
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It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.
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A good time for laughing is when you can.
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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.
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It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.
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A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
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Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.
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Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life.
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We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?
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Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
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In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults
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Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
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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.
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