109 Quotes by Rose Macaulay

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

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.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realizing the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savor the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next – that was life.

One could do with a longer year – so much to do, so little done, alas.