Quote

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.

Rose Macaulay

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Rose Macaulay
Age: 77 †
Born: 1881
Born: April 1
Died: 1958
Died: October 30
Author
Novelist
Writer
Rugby
Warwickshire
Emilie Rose Macaulay
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
Live
Pure
Votes
Children
Theory
Eccentric
Things
Ought
Spinning
Love
Liberty
Nuts
Cranks
Think
Child
Element
Looms
Thinking
Peace
Loves
Eccentricity
Desire
Vote
Crank
Makes
Elements
Jam

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Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.
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Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
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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.
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Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.
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Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
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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.
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Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
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It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
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Love's a disease. But curable.
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Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.
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The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
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How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me ... his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.
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Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
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Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
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Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed, with companions of their own age and selection.
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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.
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The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
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Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.
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