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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

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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
Words
Assuredly
Language
User
Change
Meanings
Best
Suggestions
Make
Users
Changes
Please
Winning

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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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One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.
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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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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The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
Rose Macaulay
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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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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
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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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Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.
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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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.
Rose Macaulay
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Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
Rose Macaulay
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Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that born invaders. They cannot stay at home.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
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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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
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It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
Rose Macaulay