Quote

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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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
Away
Agreeable
Cannot
Compatible
Thing
Idleness
Work
Continuing
Always
Unfortunately
Dull
Exist
Existence

More quotes by 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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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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Love's a disease. But curable.
Rose Macaulay
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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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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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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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To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Rose Macaulay
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Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
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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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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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
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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.
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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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
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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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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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Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.
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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The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
Rose Macaulay
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It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
Rose Macaulay