Rebecca West Quotations

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

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

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

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

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.

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

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.

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

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

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

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

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

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

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

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

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

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

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

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.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

I write books to find out about things.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

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.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

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

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

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

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.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.

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.

When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?

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.

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, 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.

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.

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

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.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

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.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.

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.

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life 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.

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

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.

One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste.

Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

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

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

No great thing happens suddenly.

The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

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

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

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.

I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.

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.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

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

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

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

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.

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

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.

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.

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

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.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

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.

If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.

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

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.

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

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.