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The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.

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
Passing
Boomerang
Return
Pigeon
Writer
Manuscript
May
Pigeons
Manuscripts
Faithfulness
Passings
Forth
Homing

More quotes by Rose Macaulay

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It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
Rose Macaulay
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There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.
Rose Macaulay
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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.
Rose Macaulay
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When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
Rose Macaulay
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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
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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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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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One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.
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
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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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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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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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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
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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