We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

- Jessamyn West

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

- Jessamyn West

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

- 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

Groan and forget it.

- Jessamyn West

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

- Jessamyn West

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

- Jessamyn West

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

- Jessamyn West

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

- Jessamyn West

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

- Jessamyn West

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

- Jessamyn West

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

- Jessamyn West

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

- Jessamyn West

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

- Jessamyn West

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

- Jessamyn West

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

- Jessamyn West

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

- Jessamyn West

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

- Jessamyn West

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

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