Rebecca West - Quotes

Quotes

• "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
• "There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano."
• "Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and their audience."
• "Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
• "All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing."
• "If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell."
• "Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever."
• "I am a fanatical admirer of A. L. Barker. If you cannot read her it is your fault. You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire The Middling or An Occasion for Embarrassment."
• " habit of constructing his novels on the same pattern as the mandrill, with the parts devoted to sexual activities far too extensive and highly coloured."
• "A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps."
• "Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either."
• "Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow."
• "It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
• "Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."
• "In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again."
• "It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk."
• "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.""