Rebecca west quotes

My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so.

Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

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

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

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

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

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

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.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.

I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.

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.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

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.

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

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.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

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

No great thing happens suddenly.

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 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.

All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

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

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

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.

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

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

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

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

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

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

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

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

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.

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

If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.

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

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

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

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

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

Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

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

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

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

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.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.

Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.

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

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.

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

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

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.

Unhappy people are dangerous.

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.

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.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

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

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family.

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.

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

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

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

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

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.

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

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

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.

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

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

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.

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

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.

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.

If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.

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

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

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.