Rebecca West > Quotes

“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

“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.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
― Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
― Rebecca West

“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”
― Rebecca West, The Harsh Voice

“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, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.”
― Rebecca West

“People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.”
― Ivy Baker Priest

“It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.”
― Rebecca West

“Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”
― Rebecca West, The Book Of Military Quotations

“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.”
― Rebecca West

“Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other, but it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”
― Rebecca West

“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.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“Yes,” said Mamma, “this 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, The Fountain Overflows

“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“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

“Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.”
― Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

“At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.”
― Rebecca West

“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.”
― Rebecca West, Birds Fall Down

“It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.”
― Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

“Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.”
― Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

“I realized that if I had said to them, "You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket," they would have nodded and said, "Yes," and if I had gone on and said, "But you yourselves have only second-class tickets," they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides, lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens shone mauve; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath of a plague and have escaped it.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.”
― Rebecca West

“She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.”
― Rebecca West, This Real Night

“Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep. ”
― Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down