Rebecca West Quotes

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

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

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.

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.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.