Rose Macaulay
Rose Macaulay
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay DBEwas an English writer, most noted for her award-winning novel The Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography, reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs. Macaulay’s novels were partly-influenced by Virginia Woolf; she also wrote biographies and travelogues...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 August 1881
believe atheism strange
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
giving interesting doubt
Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
freedom thinking people
There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.
selfish compassion people
How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.
food fall taken
Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
strong war hate
Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.
betrayal behavior revealing
Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.
world
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
wells jolly publishers
Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.
home england born
Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.
food felt
When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
lust impulse primitive
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
civilization long achievement
what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?
missing feelings may
miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.