Quotes from Rebecca West

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.

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.

It seemed a good idea at the time.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.

There is 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.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

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.

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

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

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.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

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.

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.

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

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

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

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