Jessamyn West Quotes

• A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

  Jessamyn West

• A big iron needle stitching the country together.

  Jessamyn West

• Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Reveals, Fiction, Reality, Books

• 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

  Topics in Humor

  Tags in Hearts, Appreciate, Breaking

• Groan and forget it.

  Jessamyn West

  Tags in Events

• Suffering is also one of the ways of knowing you’re alive.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Adversity

• Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Courage, Absolutely, Writing

• Teaching is the royal road to learning.

  Jessamyn West

  Tags in Helping Other People

• If you want a baby, have a new one. Don’t baby the old one.

  Jessamyn West

  Tags in Helping Other People

• 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

  Topics in Failure

  Tags in Forgiveness

• A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Love, Religion

  Tags in Awareness

• Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Family, Friendship

  Tags in Solitude, Writers And Writing

• There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

  Jessamyn West

  Topics in Age, Youth

  Tags in Communication

Jessamyn West (33)

Birth:	18th July, 1902
Death:	23rd February, 1984
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Writer

About

Mary Jessamyn West was born in Vernon, Jennings County, Indiana, USA. She was an American novelist and short story writer. She earned a BA degree in English from Whittier College in 1923. She also studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Oxford University. She wrote several novels include: The Friendly Persuasion, The Witch Diggers (Nominations: National Book Award for Fiction), A Matter of Time, Leafy Rivers, and Except for Me and Thee. She wrote several short stories include: Cress Delahanty, and Collected Stories of Jessamyn West. She has written other books include: To see the dream, Love is not what you think (nonfiction), The Quaker Reader, Hide and Seek, The secret look (poetry), The Massacre at Fall Creek (fiction, Won- Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize), The Woman Said Yes (memoir), and Double Discovery.

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Today's Anniversary - 16th November

Births

• 1967 - Lisa Bonet
• 1952 - Shigeru Miyamoto
• 1905 - Albert Edwin Condon
• 1904 - Nnamdi Azikiwe
• 1895 - Paul Hindemith

Deaths

• 1961 - Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn
• 2006 - Milton Friedman
• 1985 - Stuart Chase
• 1894 - Robert Charles Winthrop
• 1973 - Alan Wilson Watts