Rebecca West Quotes

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

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.

There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness.

She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form.

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.

Perché mai la vita moderna ha generato orrori al cui confronto le vecchie tragedie sembrano spettacoli per bambini? Forse perché l'umanità in cerca di avventura ha cambiato troppo il mondo esterno che genera la vita.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

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.

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.

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)

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.

So I committed this horrible offense of treating my husband as if what strangers saw counted, which destroys the whole purpose of marriage, which betrays the trust which is the real point of marriage.