Quotes by Rebecca West

• Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
• There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
• Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
• 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.
• There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
• Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
• There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
• The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
• The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
• The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
• The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
• It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
• Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
• Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
• 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.
• Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
• It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
• It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
• People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
• There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
• 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.
• All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
• 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.
• He is every other inch a gentleman.
• Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
• 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 only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
• International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
• I write books to find out about things.
• I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
• A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
• Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
• Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
• God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
• 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.
• But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.