Rebecca West - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)

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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
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

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

Rebecca West
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

Rebecca West
She moved with a slowness that was a sign of richness; cream does not pour quickly.

Rebecca West
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

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

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
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
His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

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

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

Rebecca West
Were I to…take a [Yugoslav] peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in turn into his father, I would never hear the word 'yes' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years.

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
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

Rebecca West
If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.

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
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
Ibsen cried out for ideas for the same reason that men called out for water, because he had not got any.

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

Rebecca West
There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

Rebecca West
There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

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
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
Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

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

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.

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

Rebecca West