Rebecca West famous quotes

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

#Funny #Sarcastic #Women

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

#Girly #Peace #Time

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.
-- Rebecca West

#Pain #Night #Mad

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

#Art #Women #Criticism

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.
-- Rebecca West

#People #Common Sense #Giving

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

#Love #Real #Writing

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

#Passion #Destiny #Soul

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

#Life #Believe #Extraordinary

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
-- Rebecca West

#Art #Luxury #Art Is

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

#Communication #Illusion #Conversation

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

#Truth #Simple #Men

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

#Music #Quiet #Certain

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

#Life #Struggle #Adventure

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

#Communication #Writing #Mind

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

#Mean #Europe #America

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

#Women #Differences #Idiot

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

#Taken #Miracle #Existence

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

#Mother #Horse #Humorous

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

#Peace #Cat #Bird

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.
-- Rebecca West

#War #Thinking #Ideas

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.
-- Rebecca West

#People #Upholstery #Imagine

But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.
-- Rebecca West

#Running #Drinking #Order

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

#Powerful #Hypocrisy #Agents

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

#Success #Vices #Virtue

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

#Flower #Heart #Doors

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

#Acceptance #Trying #Sometimes

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

#Thinking #Civilization #Games

[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

#Cute #Sick #Made

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

#Secret #Causes #Ends

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.
-- Rebecca West

#Book #Doctors #Years

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

#Errors #Literature #Monkeys

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

#Unity #Literature #Synthesis

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
-- Rebecca West

#Smell #Differences #History

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

#People #Literature #Salt

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
-- Rebecca West

#Book #Artist #Punishment

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
-- Rebecca West

#Sleep #Reason

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.
-- Rebecca West

#Vices #Tendencies #Tempted

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

#Sex #Women #Civilization

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

#Men #Civilization #Reform

I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
-- Rebecca West

#Men #Expectations #Quality

For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.
-- Rebecca West

#War #Fighting #Men

I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?
-- Rebecca West

#Able #Wonderful

All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.
-- Rebecca West

#Love You #Mean #Dark

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.
-- Rebecca West

#Thinking #Hands #Heartless

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
-- Rebecca West

#Play

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.
-- Rebecca West

#War #Hands #Psychology

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

#Character #Mystery

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.
-- Rebecca West

#Music #Journey #Air

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

#Music #Effort #Heaven

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
-- Rebecca West

#Music #Tragedy #World

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

#Age #Investment #Sensible

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

#Fighting #Octopus #Mind

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

#Sex #Moving #Men

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.
-- Rebecca West

#Memories #Writing #Thinking

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
-- Rebecca West

#Two #Kind #Imperialism

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

#Justice #Legal System #Steps

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.
-- Rebecca West

#Law #Justice #Choices

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

#Flames #Age #Grass

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
-- Rebecca West

#Pain #Good Things #Western

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

#Art #Philosophy #Paris

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

#Men #Sometimes #Doom

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
-- Rebecca West

#Real #Church #Want

Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.
-- Rebecca West

#Cat #Doubt #Comfort

his smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth ...
-- Rebecca West

#Real #Teeth #His Smile

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

#Peace #Taken #Marine

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.
-- Rebecca West

#Smell #Differences #Matter

When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
-- Rebecca West

#Sex #Believe #Army

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
-- Rebecca West

#Sex #World #Life Is

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

#Men #Littles #World

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

#Able #Wells #Humans

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
-- Rebecca West

#Revolution #Wealth #Rich

Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.
-- Rebecca West

#Body #Poverty #Spirit

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

#Men #Wife #Office

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

#Gambling #Flesh #Casinos