Rebecca West Quotes

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

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

~ 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, or a prostitute.

~ Rebecca West

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. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

~ Rebecca West

Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe?

~ Rebecca West

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

~ 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

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

~ Rebecca West

Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality[.]

~ Rebecca West

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.

~ Rebecca West

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.

~ 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

I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.

~ Rebecca West

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

~ Rebecca West

Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.

~ Rebecca West

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

~ Rebecca West

The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

~ Rebecca West

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West

Nothing succeeds like failure.

~ 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

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

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Rebecca West