A big iron needle stitching the country together.
Jessamyn West

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

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
Jessamyn West

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

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

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
Jessamyn West

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West

Groan and forget it.
Jessamyn West

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
Jessamyn West

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.
Jessamyn West


If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
Jessamyn West

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?
Jessamyn West

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.
Jessamyn West

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
Jessamyn West

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.
Jessamyn West

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
Jessamyn West

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.
Jessamyn West

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.
Jessamyn West

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
Jessamyn West

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
Jessamyn West