Top 100 Rebecca West Quotes
#1. Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.
George Bernard Shaw
#2. God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
#3. Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
Rebecca West
#4. Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.
Rebecca West
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then had published a limerick.
Rebecca West
#9. There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
Rebecca West
#10. Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.
Rebecca West
#11. This soup is as cold as the sea! But he was not shouting at the soup. He was shouting at the Turks, at the Venetians, at the Austrians, at the French, and at the Serbs (if he was Croat) or at the Croats (if he was a Serb).
Rebecca West
#12. The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
#13. Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
Rebecca West
#14. The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
#15. The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
Rebecca West
#16. The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
Rebecca West
#17. The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
#18. 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
#19. What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.
Rebecca West
#20. [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
#21. 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
#22. A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.
Rebecca West
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!
Rebecca West
#26. 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
#27. Music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
Rebecca West
#28. Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
#29. Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.
Rebecca West
#30. Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
#31. I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
Rebecca West
#32. [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
#33. Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.
Rebecca West
#34. 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
#36. The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.
Rebecca West
#37. Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.
Rebecca West
#38. 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
#39. One of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
#40. She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.
Rebecca West
#41. To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
Rebecca West
#42. 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
#43. There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
Rebecca West
#44. 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
#45. The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.
Rebecca West
#46. Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
#47. When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
Rebecca West
#48. The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup ...
Rebecca West
#49. The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Rebecca West
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.
Rebecca West
#53. That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty
Rebecca West
#54. [N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
#56. If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
Rebecca West
#57. 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
#58. Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever
Rebecca West
#59. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
#60. Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Rebecca West
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
#65. International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
Rebecca West
#66. The reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.
Rebecca West
#67. I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Rebecca Solnit
#68. Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
Rebecca West
#69. I try to remember what it was like to be a kid in New York. I lived in different parts of my childhood in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, where 'When You Reach Me' is set, and also in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.
Rebecca Stead
#70. 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
#71. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
Rebecca West
#72. Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
Rebecca West
#74. But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
Rebecca West
#75. 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
#76. Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
#77. There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West
#78. The bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.
Rebecca West
#79. 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
#80. It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.
Rebecca West
#81. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world. [husband Henry Andrews]
Rebecca West
#82. Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.
Rebecca West
#83. I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
Rebecca West
#84. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
Rebecca West
#85. 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
#86. It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
#87. 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
#88. I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.
Rebecca West
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
Rebecca West
#92. Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.
Rebecca West
#93. To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
Rebecca West
#94. It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West
#95. 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
#96. To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.
Rebecca West
#97. A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.
Rebecca West
#98. Three times we stopped dead. The first found us in Lovegrove High Street, and we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of youths, who put their heads inside the car and insincerely pretended that we were in a position to sell them roasted chestnuts.
Rebecca West
#99. Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.
Rebecca West
#100. The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
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