Rebecca West Quotes

...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.

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.

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.

I find that this always happens when I try to interrupt Slavs who are quarreling. They draw all the energy out of the air by the passion of their debate, so that anything outside its orbit can only flutter trivially.

It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible.

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.

Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it.

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. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.

But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.

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

I wanted you to forgive me for being me,” he said, “and having to be what I am, and do what I have done.” A smile passed over his lips. “Just as you might ask me to forgive you for being you.

It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other, but it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.