Rebecca West quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rebecca West

Rebecca West Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rebecca West on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

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

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.

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

There was a golden heaviness about her face, to look on it was like watching honey drop slowly from a spoon.

Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.

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.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

Unhappy people are dangerous.

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

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

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

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

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

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

That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

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

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

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

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

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

She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air.

Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

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

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

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

The world had gone too far in its enthusiasm for moderation and the thing had to be stopped

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

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

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

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.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

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.

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

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.

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

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

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.

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

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

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

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy ...

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

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

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

It seemed a good idea at the time.

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

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

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.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

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

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

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

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

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

It matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

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

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

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

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

He is every other inch a gentleman.

The stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the incorporated rapacity of wolves..

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.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano.

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

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

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

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

She repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music

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

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

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

Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

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