Rebecca West Quotes

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

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, or a prostitute.

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

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.

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

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

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

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

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

Nothing succeeds like failure.

There is 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.

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

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

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.

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

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