Rebecca West Quotes & Sayings

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed a good idea at the time. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

To lovers innumerable things do not matter. — Rebecca West

A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh. — Rebecca West

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains. — Rebecca West

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

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

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space. — Rebecca West

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy ... — Rebecca West

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

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

[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

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

The reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it. — Rebecca West

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also. — Rebecca West

As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides, lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens shone mauve; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath of a plague and have escaped it. — Rebecca West

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep. — Rebecca West

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

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. — Rebecca West

He is every other inch a gentleman. — Rebecca West

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

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

One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste. — Rebecca West

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

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example. — Rebecca West

The stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the incorporated rapacity of wolves.. — Rebecca West

...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor. — Rebecca West

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

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music. — Rebecca West

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. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

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

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

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought. — Rebecca West

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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. — Rebecca West

He is in his late sixties, but has the charm of extreme youth, for he comes to a pleasure and hails it happily for what it is without any bitterness accumulated from past disappointments, and he believes that any moment the whole process of life may make a slight switch-over and that everything will be agreeable for ever. His manners would satisfy the standards of any capital in the world, but at the same time he is exquisitely, pungently local. — Rebecca West

Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe. — Rebecca West

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

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

The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented with abstract designs in chocolate, grey, and bottle-green, such as Western plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark green printed velvet used in wagons-lits. — Rebecca West

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

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth. — Rebecca West

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever. — Rebecca West

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious. — Rebecca West

[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

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

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

Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere. — Rebecca West

[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

It is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult. — Rebecca West

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

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine. — Rebecca West

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas. — Rebecca West

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

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

Unhappy people are dangerous. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

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

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. — Rebecca West

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

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

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived. — Rebecca West

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

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

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

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes. — Rebecca West

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy. — Rebecca West

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