Quotes from Rebecca West

Literature is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

So I committed this horrible offense of treating my husband as if what strangers saw counted, which destroys the whole purpose of marriage, which betrays the trust which is the real point of marriage.

Human relations are essentially imperfect.

It was one of those autumn mornings which are devoid of melancholy, when the weather seems to be cleaning its house. A broom of wind sent the clouds above flying briskly and kept the fallen leaves scudding along the pavements, the trees looked as if they were being stripped to let the rains get at them better.

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

Every event of any magnitude changes life unpredictably.

It struck her that the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilization will split before it can reach any goal that could justify its expenditure of effort.

It seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.--Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

It's funny – you Irish are so like the Serbs.

So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed sharp and strong.:

When we talked to them we always expressed the love we felt for them and never made the chilling remarks which the part of us undesirous of friendship sometimes tricked us into making to those who might possibly have become our friends.

Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present.

That is the great handicap of sexual love, that lovers can share everything except what explains the past, of which their enjoyment is a part.

But our grief was useless. Salt water, spilled on the ground, does not feed what grows there, but kills it.

Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness

Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all.

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance. Everything enjoyable had an equal value. In life we were not divided. Life itself was not divided.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

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

The moment ached, as if music were being played somewhere on an instrument whose strings had some connexion with her heart.

You should smile at that,' he said. 'There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy.

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