Rebecca West Quotes

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

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

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

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

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.

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

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

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.

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

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.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

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

When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!

it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.

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

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.

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

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.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.

... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

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

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.

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

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

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?

There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

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

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.

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

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

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.

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

Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...

[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.

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.

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