Rebecca West Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”
-- Rebecca West

#Funny #Sarcastic #Women
“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.”
-- Rebecca West

#Girly #Peace #Time
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
-- Rebecca West

#Pain #Night #Mad
“Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.”
-- Rebecca West

#Art #Women #Criticism
“Yes,â€ said Mamma, â€œthis is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are 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

#People #Common Sense #Giving
“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

#Love #Real #Writing
“It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.”
-- Rebecca West

#Passion #Destiny #Soul
“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
-- Rebecca West

#Life #Believe #Extraordinary
“Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
-- Rebecca West

#Art #Luxury #Art Is
“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
-- Rebecca West

#Communication #Illusion #Conversation
“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
-- Rebecca West

#Truth #Simple #Men
“Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.”
-- Rebecca West

#Music #Quiet #Certain
“Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.”
-- Rebecca West

#Life #Struggle #Adventure
“Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.”
-- Rebecca West

#Communication #Writing #Mind
“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

#Mean #Europe #America
“The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.”
-- Rebecca West

#Women #Differences #Idiot
“Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.”
-- Rebecca West

#Taken #Miracle #Existence
“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.”
-- Rebecca West

#Mother #Horse #Humorous
“Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.”
-- Rebecca West

#Peace #Cat #Bird
“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.”
-- Rebecca West

#War #Thinking #Ideas
“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.”
-- Rebecca West

#People #Upholstery #Imagine
“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

#Running #Drinking #Order
“Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.”
-- Rebecca West

#Powerful #Hypocrisy #Agents
“It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.”
-- Rebecca West

#Success #Vices #Virtue
“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.”
-- Rebecca West

#Flower #Heart #Doors
“Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.”
-- Rebecca West

#Acceptance #Trying #Sometimes
“I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.”
-- Rebecca West

#Thinking #Civilization #Games
“[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.”
-- Rebecca West

#Cute #Sick #Made
“Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.”
-- Rebecca West

#Secret #Causes #Ends
“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.”
-- Rebecca West

#Book #Doctors #Years

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