Dorothy West Quotes

To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.

There is no life that does not contribute to history.

Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.

Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity.

If the Best is yet to come, the Present will blend with it Beautifully.

Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes-they throw off like sparks. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.

I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean.

It is a rule of mine never to ask unsolicited questions of people over twenty-one. I am only giving them the option of lying if they choose to. They would tell me the truth without my asking if they wanted me to know. To me that's fair enough.

Once various forms were signed, I was separated from my free will, led down the corridors into a room which was now to be the boundary of my existence, told to surrender my clothes, handed that comic invention, the hospital gown, and sent to bed in broad daylight like a child being stripped of her privileges.

I never knew a man who got so hurt in his pocketbook.