Top 216 Quotes & Sayings by Rebecca West

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish author Rebecca West.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Rebecca West

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph, and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959; in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth. — © Rebecca West
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
I write books to find out about things.
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple. — © Rebecca West
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
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.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
He is every other inch a gentleman.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
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.
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
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.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
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.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
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.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet? — © Rebecca West
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity. — © Rebecca West
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.
No great thing happens suddenly.
What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.
Unhappy people are dangerous.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!