![Rebecca West quotes: ...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.](http://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/rebecca-west-quotes-1472546.jpg "Rebecca West quotes: ...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.")
![Rebecca West quotes: [N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.](http://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/rebecca-west-quotes-3569.jpg "Rebecca West quotes: [N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.")
[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth. 
The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds. 
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep. 
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning. 
The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine. 
It matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death. 
People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat. 
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. 
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. 
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience. 
Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world. 
Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to. 
Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips. 
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 
There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die. 
What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. 
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. 
History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious. 
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle. 
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains. 
Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow. 
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example. 
A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps. 
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity. 
She repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music 
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. 
The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy. 
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. 
Music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven. 
There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano. 
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. 
The stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the incorporated rapacity of wolves.. 
He is every other inch a gentleman. ![Rebecca West quotes: The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.](http://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/rebecca-west-quotes-1334637.jpg "Rebecca West quotes: The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.")
The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted. 
A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. 
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology. 
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first. 
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. 
If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution. 
The reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. 
Man is a hating rather than a loving animal. 
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. 
Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman. 
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. 
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. 
Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. 
I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual. 
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. 