Quotes from Rebecca West

The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

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

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

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

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

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.

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

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

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.

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