Rebecca West Quotes

Here was the authentic voice of the Slav. These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.

A city that had learned to make good bread had learned to make good cake also. A city that built itself up by good sense and industry had formed a powerful secondary intention of elegance.

is your home a good housemate?

(Happy Starts at Home: Getting the Life You Want by Changing the Space You've Got, Rebecca West)

It appeared possible that these other men were good fathers only because they knew too little of the world to grow frenzied against it.

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.

she repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music

I find that this always happens when I try to interrupt Slavs who are quarreling. They draw all the energy out of the air by the passion of their debate, so that anything outside its orbit can only flutter trivially.

I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance. Everything enjoyable had an equal value. In life we were not divided. Life itself was not divided.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.

What a gamble it is to have children!

the world had gone too far in its enthusiasm for moderation and the thing had to be stopped

So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed sharp and strong.:

we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously

"who" is your home? Your home is so much more than just an impersonal roof over your head. In fact, the personality of your home "lives with you" and influences you as much as the actual people and pets that share your space. That means it's important to figure out just "who" it is you are living with. So If your home were a persona that woke up next to you every day, stood in the kitchen each morning when you poured your first cup of coffee and waited at the front door when you arrived, who would it be? For me, my home is like a best friend who waits for me at the front door with cookies and flowers, and who greets me in the kitchen with a cheery "Good morning." Nice, eh?

(Happy Starts at Home: Getting the Life You Want by Changing the Space You've Got, Rebecca West)