Rebecca West - People Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

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

Rebecca West
When the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

Rebecca West
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
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
There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

Rebecca West
The air of luxury in Sarajevo has less to do with material goods than with the people. They greet delight here with unreluctant and sturdy appreciation, they are even prudent about it, they will let no drop of pleasure run to waste.

Rebecca West
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

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
I read a Finnish novel. It was all about people riding bicycles.

Rebecca West
Which is it, I wonder, do I talk too much or does it merely seem to people that I talk too much? And which of those alternatives is the most disagreeable?

Rebecca West
It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

Rebecca West
There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

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

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
Like all people who have lived long in exile, she sometimes felt that everything peculiar to the strange place where she found herself was a spreading sore, bubo of a plague that will infect and kill if there is not instant flight to the aseptic.

Rebecca West
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

Rebecca West
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Rebecca West
I do not myself find it agreeable to be ninety, 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