Rebecca West Quotes - Page 6

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

Rebecca West

Music, Quiet, Certain

Rebecca West (2012). “The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund”, p.554, Open Road Media

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

Rebecca West

Art, Philosophy, Paris

Rebecca West (2010). “The Birds Fall Down”, p.81, Open Road Media

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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.

Rebecca West

Flower, Heart, Doors

Rebecca West (2010). “A Train of Powder”, p.75, Open Road Media

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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.

Rebecca West

Peace, Taken, Marine

Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.442, Open Road Media

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When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!

Rebecca West

God

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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?

Rebecca West

Sex, Men, Two

Rebecca West (2011). “The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17”, p.139, Open Road Media

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It seemed a good idea at the time.

Rebecca West

Ideas, Good Ideas

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Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.

Rebecca West

Wine, Balance, Fundamentals

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.6, Open Road Media

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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

Rebecca West

Men, Sometimes, Doom

Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.818, Open Road Media

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For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.

Rebecca West

War, Fighting, Men

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.143, Open Road Media

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If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.

Rebecca West

Thinking, If There Is A God, Trying

"Rebecca West, The Art of Fiction No. 65". Interview with Marina Warner, The Paris Review, No. 79, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1981.

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I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Rebecca West

Art, Joy, Scrapbooking

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.120, Open Road Media

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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

Rebecca West

Thinking, Bridges, Views

Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.14, Open Road Media

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Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

Rebecca West

Able, Wells, Humans

Rebecca West (2011). “The Meaning of Treason”, p.148, Open Road Media

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But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.

Rebecca West

Running, Drinking, Order

Rebecca West (2010). “The Thinking Reed”, p.8, Open Road Media

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Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

Rebecca West

Art, Inspire, Goes On

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.113, Open Road Media

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There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

Rebecca West

Hate, Lying, People

Rebecca West (2010). “The Thinking Reed”, p.180, Open Road Media

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Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.

Rebecca West

Real, Drama, Home

Rebecca West (1982). “The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17”

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To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

Rebecca West

Sympathy, Running, Hurt

Rebecca West (2010). “The Judge”, p.245, Open Road Media

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I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

Rebecca West

Justice, Legal System, Steps

Rebecca West (2005). “Woman as Artist and Thinker”, p.40, iUniverse

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After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

Rebecca West

War, Thinking, Ideas

"The Annual Obituary 1983". Book edited by Elizabeth Devine and Marion Stoker Morgan, p. 143, 1984.

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I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?

Rebecca West

Able, Wonderful, Knows

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Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

Rebecca West

Book, Doctors, Years

Rebecca West, Jane Marcus (1982). “The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17”, New York : Viking Press

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Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.

Rebecca West

Thinking, Egypt, Pyramids

Rebecca West (1982). “The young Rebecca: writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17”, Not Avail

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whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

Rebecca West

Art, War, Simple

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

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Born: December 21, 1892
Died: March 15, 1983
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

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