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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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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
Family
Never
Fits
Ideal
Fit
Ideals
Indeed
Understood

More quotes by 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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The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
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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I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.
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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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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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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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To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
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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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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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