Rebecca West Quotes

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.

No great thing happens suddenly.

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.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

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.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

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

When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

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.

To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

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.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

[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.

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.

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

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.

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.

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.

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.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

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.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

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.

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

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.

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.

Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

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

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

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.

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.

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

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.'

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

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

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.