Quote

I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me I feel that to meet them is to See Life.

Rose Macaulay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Feel
Seldom
Feels
Element
Life
Fishes
Bright
Elements
Meet
Alien
Strange
Swimming
Actors
Aliens

More quotes by Rose Macaulay

Image
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.
Rose Macaulay
Image
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
Image
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. A group of closely related persons living under one roof it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
Rose Macaulay
Image
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
Image
Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Rose Macaulay
Image
If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.
Rose Macaulay
Image
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
Image
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.
Rose Macaulay
Image
Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.
Rose Macaulay
Image
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Rose Macaulay
Image
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
Image
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
Image
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
Image
So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.
Rose Macaulay
Image
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.
Rose Macaulay
Image
Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
Rose Macaulay
Image
Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
Rose Macaulay
Image
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.
Rose Macaulay
Image
Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.
Rose Macaulay
Image
Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
Rose Macaulay