Top 100 Rebecca West Quotes
#1. Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.
Rebecca West
#2. If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.
Rebecca West
#3. 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
#4. The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
#5. There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
Rebecca West
#6. The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
#7. The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
Rebecca West
#8. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
Rebecca West
#9. What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.
Rebecca West
#10. [Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.
Rebecca West
#11. I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
Rebecca West
#12. There has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
Rebecca West
#13. It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
Rebecca West
#14. 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
#15. Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
#16. Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.
Rebecca West
#17. Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
#18. [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
#19. 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
#21. I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
Rebecca West
#22. Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.
Rebecca West
#23. The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.
Rebecca West
#24. Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
#25. When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
Rebecca West
#26. The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Rebecca West
#27. Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
Rebecca West
#28. [N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
#29. At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.
Rebecca West
#30. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
#31. There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
Rebecca West
#32. There was a faint, sharp sweetness about her, like the taste of raspberries. She wore fussy and frilly clothes and jingling bracelets with an air of surprised distaste, as if she had been put to sleep by a witch and had awoken to find herself in these trappings.
Rebecca West
#33. In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again.
Rebecca West
#34. International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
Rebecca West
#35. Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
Rebecca West
#36. There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West
#37. 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
#38. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world. [husband Henry Andrews]
Rebecca West
#39. A city that had learned to make good bread had learned to make good cake also. A city that built itself up by good sense and industry had formed a powerful secondary intention of elegance.
Rebecca West
#40. It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
#41. I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.
Rebecca West
#42. That taught me a lesson I've always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.
Rebecca West
#43. So I committed this horrible offense of treating my husband as if what strangers saw counted, which destroys the whole purpose of marriage, which betrays the trust which is the real point of marriage.
Rebecca West
#44. Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
Rebecca West
#45. Sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca West
#46. To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.
Rebecca West
#47. The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
#48. Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.
Rebecca West
#49. It matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.
Rebecca West
#50. The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
Rebecca West
#51. It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
Rebecca West
#52. Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.
Rebecca West
#53. [On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
Rebecca West
#54. Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy ...
Rebecca West
#55. It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
#56. The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
Rebecca West
#57. It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West
#58. The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.
Rebecca West
#59. If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
Rebecca West
#60. A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
#61. [The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.
Rebecca West
#62. Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.
Rebecca West
#63. Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
Rebecca West
#64. Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.
Rebecca West
#65. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Rebecca West
#66. If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West
#67. Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family.
Rebecca West
#68. All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca West
#69. The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
Rebecca West
#70. All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.
Rebecca West
#71. Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.
Rebecca West
#72. The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
Rebecca West
#73. It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.
Rebecca West
#74. You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West
#75. I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.
Rebecca West
#76. Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
Rebecca West
#77. A good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.
Rebecca West
#78. There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
#79. In the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
Rebecca West
#80. She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.
Rebecca West
#81. Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.
Rebecca West
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The world had gone too far in its enthusiasm for moderation and the thing had to be stopped
Rebecca West
#86. It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.
Rebecca West
#87. Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Rebecca West
#88. There was a golden heaviness about her face, to look on it was like watching honey drop slowly from a spoon.
Rebecca West
#89. Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.
Rebecca West
#90. Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
Rebecca West
#91. Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.
Rebecca West
#92. There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.
Rebecca West
#93. There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Rebecca West
#94. 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
#95. Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.
Rebecca West
#96. ...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.
Rebecca West
#97. Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
Rebecca West
#98. I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
Rebecca West
#99. Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
#100. Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.
Rebecca West
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