We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Realism
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
—Jessamyn West
Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Sleep
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Reading, Imagination, Reality, Books
Suffering is also one of the ways of knowing you’re alive.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
—Jessamyn West
To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Listening
If you want a baby, have a new one. Don’t baby the old one.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Parenting, Parents, Babies
Groan and forget it.
—Jessamyn West
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Words
Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Memory
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Writing
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Love
I’ve done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
—Jessamyn West
Topics: Truth
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