Rebecca West Quotes

Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present.

Then why did we not bring the book?” asked my husband. “Well, it weighs just over a stone,” I said. “I weighed it once on the bathroom scales.” “Why did you do that?” asked my husband. “Because it occurred to me one day that I knew the weight of nothing except myself and joints of meat,” I said, “and I just picked that up to give me an idea of something else.

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

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.

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 seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything.

That is the great handicap of sexual love, that lovers can share everything except what explains the past, of which their enjoyment is a part.

The Republic was extremely pious. She spoke of her Christianity at all times, and in her Golden Book there is a prayer for the magistrates of the Republic which runs: ‘0 Lord, Father Almighty, who hast chosen this Republic to serve Thee, choose, we beseech Thee, our governors, according to Thy Will and our necessity: that so, fearing Thee and keeping Thy Holy Commandments, they may cherish and direct us in true charity. Amen.’ Never was there a city so full of churches and chapels, never was there a people who submitted more loyally to the discipline of the Church. But there was a certain incongruity with this in their foreign policy.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is. — Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.