Rebecca West Quotes

Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, ...

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

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication betw...

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

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

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

[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the grea...

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call m...

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to...

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

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtfu...

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

Nothing succeeds like failure.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intellig...

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

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers j...

There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them a...

The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent...

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but ...

I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tio...

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relat...

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep p...

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more li...

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure ...

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and ha...

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

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of no...

Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical cit...

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call m...