Top 216 Quotes & Sayings by Rebecca West - Page 2

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

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.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

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

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

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.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

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

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

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

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

If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.

Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.

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

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.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

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.

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

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

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

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

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.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

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

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

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.

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

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

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

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

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

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

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.

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

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

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

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

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.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

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.

All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.