Literary Birthday – 1 August – Rose Macaulay

Rose Macaulay was born on 1 August 1881 and died on 30 October 1958.

Rose Macaulay Quotes

1. It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
2. Life, for all its agonies…is exciting and beautiful, amusing and endearing…and whatever is to come after it — we shall not have this life again.
3. You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.
4. He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays—cynical but hopeful.
5. Words, those precious gems of queer shape and gay colours, sharp angles and soft contours, shades of meaning laid one over the other down history, so that for those far back one must delve among the lost and lovely litter that strews the centuries. They arrange themselves in the most elegant odd patterns; the sound the strangest sweet euphonious notes; they flute and sing and taber, and disappear, like apparitions, with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang.
6. At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
7. Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Rose Macaulay was an English writer. She wrote 35 books, including novels, biographies and travel writing. Her writing career spanned 50 years, beginning with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. She first attracted public attention as a social satirist with a series of novels including Potterism, Dangerous Ages, and Told by an Idiot. Her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, is generally regarded as her masterpiece and she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956 for the novel. She was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1958.

Source for Image: Jburlinson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Rose_macaulay.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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