Top 15 Rebecca West Quotes

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.

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, or a prostitute.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.

[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.

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

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

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

It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.