Rebecca West Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Rebecca West

  Fighting, Octopus, Mind

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.839, Open Road Media

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Book, Artist, Punishment

  5 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  Causes, Be Careful, Company

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• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Art, Essence, Cups

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.36, Open Road Media

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

  Rebecca West

  Success, Vices, Virtue

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

  Rebecca West

  Suicidal, Saws, Unending

  Rebecca West (1928). “The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West”

  9 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  Life, Struggle, Adventure

  18 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  Memories, Power, Mere

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.159, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Mom, Mother, Humanity

  14 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  People, Wonder, Novel

  16 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  Writing, Loss, Would Be

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• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Blow, Destiny, Names

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.545, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Trust, Believe, People

  Statement in the Sunday Telegraph in 1975. "Rebecca West: A Life". Book by Victoria Glendinning, p. 11, 1987.

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  People, Doe, Literature

  4 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca West

  Rivers, Bird, Black

  Rebecca West (2016). “The Return of the Soldier”, p.31, Xist Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  People, Common Sense, Giving

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Fountain Overflows”, p.275, Open Road Media

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• ... 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.

  Rebecca West

  Believe, Men, Ideas

  Rebecca West (1928). “The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Love, Real, Writing

  "The Art of Scepticism" (1952)

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Piano, Design, Made

  Rebecca West (2010). “Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy”, p.87, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Daughter, School, Class

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• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Sex, Women, Civilization

  Speech to the Fabian Society in 1928. "Dame Rebecca West Dies in London" by Linda Charlton, archive.nytimes.com. March 16, 1983.

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• the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

  Rebecca West

  Drinking, Addiction, Alcohol

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.373, Open Road Media

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• It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

  Rebecca West

  Smell, Differences, History

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.

  Rebecca West

  Music, Effort, Heaven

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• 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.

  Rebecca West

  Morning, Food, Mean

  4 Copy quote

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