Quotes from Rebecca West

But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn't do anything to people but blame them for things they haven't done? It will be like spending one's whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper.

Perché mai la vita moderna ha generato orrori al cui confronto le vecchie tragedie sembrano spettacoli per bambini? Forse perché l'umanità in cerca di avventura ha cambiato troppo il mondo esterno che genera la vita.

L'indifferenza significa che gli occhi non hanno più bisogno di cercarsi, le mani di protendersi; né le labbra di unirsi, perché è un'unione in cui non ci si accorge più della separazione dei corpi.

Capitalism has grooved society with a number of deep slots along which human beings can roll to a fixed destination. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him.

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.

Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality.

It was the same when they sat in his office, a stupendous apartment designed in that modernist style which represents the last attempt of bad taste to escape the criticisms of good taste.

This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity

She had treated her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished.

They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had to repeat old jokes because it could no longer invent new ones, and speak of virtues in phrases so worn by use that they gave the same feeling of want as rags.

There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

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.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

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.

It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

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

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.