Rebecca West Quotes - Page 7

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In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

Rebecca West

Mean, England And America, Europe

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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

Rebecca West

Sex, World, Life Is

Rebecca West (2011). “The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17”, p.82, Open Road Media

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I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

Rebecca West

Confusion, Use, Tests

Rebecca West (2005). “Woman as Artist and Thinker”, p.11, iUniverse

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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Rebecca West

Funny, Military, Real

Quoted in Jonathon Green, Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982)

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It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Rebecca West

Writing, Race, History

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My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so.

Rebecca West

Memories, Writing, Thinking

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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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A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

Rebecca West

Change, Drama, Play

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.16, 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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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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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.

Rebecca West

Men, Expectations, Quality

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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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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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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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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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There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

Rebecca West

Grief, Cutting, Grace

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

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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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Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Rebecca West

Book, Writing, Might

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.169, Open Road Media

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No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

Rebecca West

Writing, Vitality, Fiction

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The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Rebecca West

Reading, Men, Independence

Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.140, Open Road Media

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The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

Rebecca West

Successful, Giving, Portraits

Rebecca West (2014). “Henry James: A Critical Biography”, p.42, Open Road Media

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To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

Rebecca West

Men, World, Littles

Rebecca West (2011). “The Meaning of Treason”, p.260, Open Road Media

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... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.

Rebecca West

Happy, Laughter, Guarantees That

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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