Rebecca West Quotes

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.

L'indifferenza significa che gli occhi non hanno più bisogno di cercarsi, le mani di protendersi; né le labbra di unirsi, perché è un'unione in cui non ci si accorge più della separazione dei corpi.

"Nikolai growled, "The French lost Strasbourg, they lost Alsace, they lost Lorraine, which they pretended was sacred to them because of their saint, though they are deeply infidel. A republican people deserves to lose all, must lose all."
"But," objected Laura, "when France lost Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, France wasn't a republican, it was ruled by the Emperor."
"No matter," said Nikolai, "the French were a people who once had it in them to make France a republican country, and had it in them to make it one again.

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

What would the United States be like if it had not those reservoirs of triumphant will-power, the historical facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American statesmen, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every American citizen has at his mental command and into which he can plunge for revivification at any minute? To have a difficult history makes, perhaps, a people who are bound to be difficult in any conditions, lacking these means of refreshment.

Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.

Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.