Rebecca West Quotes

British writer, journalist, literary critic, and feminist (1892-1983)

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield DBE (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Lynx

Birth Name: Cecily Isabel Fairfield

Alternative Names: West, Dame Rebecca • Dame Rebecca West • Cicely Fairchild • Cicily Isabel Andrews • Cicily Andrews • Cicely Isabel Fairfield • Cicily Isobel Fairfield • Cicily Isabel Fairfield • Cicily Fairfield Andrews • Mrs H. M. Andrews • Cicily Fairfield • Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield • Cicily Farifield

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

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

It was one of those autumn mornings which are devoid of melancholy, when the weather seems to be cleaning its house. A broom of wind sent the clouds above flying briskly and kept the fallen leaves scudding along the pavements, the trees looked as if they were being stripped to let the rains get at them better.

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.

Her ability to appraise historical and global figures as if she had recently been personally oppressed or insulted by them was a great assistance in driving her narrative forward.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence

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

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.

but it is not what one does so much as the way that while one does it time runs past forever.

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.

There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.