Quotes from Rebecca West

The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

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.

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, or a prostitute.

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

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.

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.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

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

It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

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

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.

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.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.

Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

I realized that if I had said to them, "You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket," they would have nodded and said, "Yes," and if I had gone on and said, "But you yourselves have only second-class tickets," they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.