Rebecca West Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.

  Rebecca West

  Believe, Responsibility, Suffering

  Rebecca West (2011). “Survivors in Mexico”, p.60, Open Road Media

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• it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.

  Rebecca West

  Littles, Should, Duty

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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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• The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

  Rebecca West

  Fate, Men, Cells

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.7, 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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• There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

  Rebecca West

  People, Doe, Faces

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Thinking Reed”, p.12, Open Road Media

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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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• Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

  Rebecca West

  Men, Civilization, Reform

  Rebecca West (2010). “The New Meaning of Treason”, p.182, Open Road Media

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• Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

  Rebecca West

  Art, Connections, Impossible

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

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• Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

  Rebecca West

  Real, War, Lying

  Rebecca West (1952). “The meaning of treason”

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• Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.

  Rebecca West

  Race, Different Nationalities, Deeds

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.616, Open Road Media

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• The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

  Rebecca West

  Art, Grace, Delight

  Rebecca West (1957). “The Court and the Castle: Some Treatments of a Recurrent Theme /$Rebecca West”

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• When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

  Rebecca West

  Thinking, Hands, Important

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• I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

  Rebecca West

  People, Upholstery, Imagine

  "There is nothing like a dame: Dame Rebecca West at ninety". "Vogue" Magazine, February 1983.

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• One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste.

  Rebecca West

  Running, Husband, Home

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Thinking Reed”, p.149, Open Road Media

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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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• A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

  Rebecca West

  Children, Adults, Possibility

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Fountain Overflows”, p.288, Open Road Media

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• All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

  Rebecca West

  Good Life, Fiction, Biographies

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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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• a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

  Rebecca West

  Oysters, Palate, Please

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.484, 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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• 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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• Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

  Rebecca West

  Cat, Doubt, Comfort

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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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