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Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

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
Mean
Way
Excessive
Things
Moderation
Golden
Fashion
Humanity
Seems
Doe

More quotes by Rose Macaulay

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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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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Work is a dull thing you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees there are no obstructing walls.
Rose Macaulay
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One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?
Rose Macaulay
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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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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