Literary Birthday – 18 July – Jessamyn West

Jessamyn West was born on 18 July 1902 and died on 23 February 1984.

Jessamyn West Quotes

1. I’ve done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
2. Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
3. Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
4. A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humour, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
5. Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.
6. It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
7. A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
8. Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
9. The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Jessamyn West was an American author. She was a master of the short story and an accomplished novelist, most notably of The Friendly Persuasion, who wrote with particular sensitivity about mother-daughter relationships. She published four memoirs, namely To See the Dream, Hide and Seek, The Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death, and Double Discovery. She received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Whittier College in 1946, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1975.

Source for image: In the public domain in most of Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jessamyn_West_photographed_by_Johan_Hagemeyer.jpg:

by Amanda Patterson
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