Famous Rebecca West Quotations

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"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."
by Rebecca West
"Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space."
by Rebecca West
"People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
by Rebecca West
"She was like the embodiment of all women who have felt an astonished protest because their children have died before them."
by Rebecca West
"Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy. After a war it seems more like astrology."
by Dame Rebecca West
"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."
by Rebecca West
"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology."
by Rebecca West
"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
by Rebecca West
"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."
by Rebecca West
"I...have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute."
by Rebecca West
"If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed a good idea at the time.'"
by Dame Rebecca West
"It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
by 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 they real truth about his or her love affairs."
by Rebecca West
"Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul."
by Rebecca West
"Man is a hating rather than a loving animal."
by Rebecca West
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."
by Blaise Pascal
"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
by Rebecca West
"The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots."
by Rebecca West
"The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."
by Rebecca West
"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."
by Rebecca West
"Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which made it certain that what they dread shall happen."
by Dame Rebecca West
"Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience."
by Rebecca West
"There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience."
by Rebecca West
"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."
by Rebecca West
"The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots."
by Rebecca West
"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse."
by Rebecca West
"I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?"
by Rebecca West
"... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death."
by Rebecca West
"The consequence of ... centuries of warfare is that military men assume a position of too great importance in the country, which is always a m..."
by Rebecca West
"The trouble about soldiers in Mr. Siegfried Sassoon's poetry ... is that they are the kind of people who in a railroad train have to travel wi..."
by Rebecca West
"There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die."
by Rebecca West


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