Quotes by Rebecca West

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

Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to ones lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality[.]

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

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.

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 will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.

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

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 ones company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

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

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

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.

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

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

Nothing succeeds like failure.

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.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth.

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.