Rebecca West Quotes

It struck her that the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilization will split before it can reach any goal that could justify its expenditure of effort.

She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.

You should smile at that,’ he said. ‘There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy.

That is the great handicap of sexual love, that lovers can share everything except what explains the past, of which their enjoyment is a part.

She had treated her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is. — Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven.

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness

Every home is, and should be, unique. Your habits, dreams, family, and hobbies are personal to you, and ideally your space reflects and supports your unique style. There are not rules for setting up your home; it just has to work for you.

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

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.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.