Rebecca West Quotes

So, where does all that stuff come from? It comes from three main sources: stuff is bought and kept out of fear; stuff is collected and kept out of love. And stuff is kept and multiplied out of habit

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

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

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.

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.

When we talked to them we always expressed the love we felt for them and never made the chilling remarks which the part of us undesirous of friendship sometimes tricked us into making to those who might possibly have become our friends.

Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

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.

Every event of any magnitude changes life unpredictably.

Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practice and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

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.

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

That taught me a lesson I've always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.