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Rebecca West Quotes

English author and critic (b. 1892), Birth: 21-12-1892, Death: 15-3-1983 Rebecca West Quotes
1.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West

2.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West

3.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Rebecca West

4.
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West

5.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West

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6.
Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
Rebecca West

7.
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Rebecca West

8.
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West

Quote Topics by Rebecca West: Men Art People Writing Thinking Believe Real Hands Civilization War Women Race Giving Ideas Mean Sex Home Justice Book Simple History Law Music Literature World Funny Children Survival Hate Husband
9.
Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
Rebecca West

10.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
Rebecca West

11.
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
Rebecca West

12.
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West

13.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West

14.
Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.
Rebecca West

15.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West

16.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West

17.
Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
Rebecca West

18.
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
Rebecca West

19.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West

20.
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
Rebecca West

21.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West

22.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West

23.
[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
Rebecca West

24.
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
Rebecca West

25.
Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.
Rebecca West

26.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West

27.
There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.
Rebecca West

28.
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West

29.
Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.
Rebecca West

30.
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West

31.
Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.
Rebecca West

32.
Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.
Rebecca West

33.
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
Rebecca West

34.
He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West

35.
In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
Rebecca West

36.
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
Rebecca West

37.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West

38.
Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.
Rebecca West

39.
Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.
Rebecca West

40.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Rebecca West

41.
There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
Rebecca West

42.
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca West

43.
Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
Rebecca West

44.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
Rebecca West

45.
the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.
Rebecca West

46.
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.
Rebecca West

47.
Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.
Rebecca West

48.
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West

49.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West

50.
If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.
Rebecca West