Rebecca West Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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

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
She was glad that sometimes, by night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it.

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

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

Rebecca West
That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.

Rebecca West
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.

Rebecca West
On their faces lay that plastered, flattened look of loyalty to a cause.

Rebecca West
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.

Rebecca West
My scepticism long ago led me to the belief that writers write for themselves and not for their readers and that art has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

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

Rebecca West
A work of art may be simple, though that is not necessary. There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

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

Rebecca West
I bought Henry a beautiful Daimler coupé, the first new car we have ever had, a tender antelope of a car.

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
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
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?

Rebecca West
Miss Beevor had made her playing at once much better and much worse, by giving her resolute fingers greater power to express her misunderstanding of sound.

Rebecca West
I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Rebecca West
A lady once longed to be wild
But kept herself quite undefiled —
By thinking of Jesus
And veneral diseases —
And the danger of having a child.

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

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

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

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

Rebecca West
The law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

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

Rebecca West
We love people, and we say that we were 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
She was wilting, withering, diminishing, though she still spelt magnificence, as a word retains the same meaning even if it be printed in smaller and smaller type.

Rebecca West
We think in youth that our bodies are identical with ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later 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