Rebecca West Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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

Rebecca West
He gazed on her thoughtfully, like a cook who has been brought an unfamiliar kind of game and wonders if she ought to prepare it like quail or like plover.

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

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

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
I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Rebecca West
It is as if a fountain of negativism plays in the centre of Europe, killing all living things within the reach of its spray.

Rebecca West
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.

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

Rebecca West
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
Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.

Rebecca West
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
I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.

Rebecca West
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: It seemed a good idea at the time.

Rebecca West
Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

Rebecca West
All men should have a drop or two of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

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
She drooped her eyelids and put on an expression that made her face look like an unmade bed.

Rebecca West
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.

Rebecca West
She's a real woman, the kind that can't look after herself.

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

Rebecca West
To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.

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

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

Rebecca West
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Rebecca West