Rebecca West Quotes

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

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

My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so.

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.

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

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.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

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.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

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

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.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.

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.

Unhappy people are dangerous.

Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.

The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.

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

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

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.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

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.

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.

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.

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

I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.

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

Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...

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.

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

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.

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.

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

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

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.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.