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
thinking water important
Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.
morning lakes bird
Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
political synthesis moral
The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
passion law conflict
Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
home tired touching
It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.
work dull existence
Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
girlfriend wife goal
Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.
sacrifice self belief
[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.
book writing roots
One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.
travel people together
Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.
travel feels distaste
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
beautiful church littles
Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.
religious groups firsts
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
long literature novel
Nearly all novels are too long.