Authors
Rebecca West Quotes
Best Quotes by Rebecca West (Top 10)
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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West -
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West -
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West -
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West -
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
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It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West -
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.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West -
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
More Rebecca West Quotes
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
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There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
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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 -
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
Rebecca West -
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West -
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
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People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West -
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West -
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 -
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 -
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