Rebecca West Quotes

In any class I feel at home, and I am never accepted, because of the traces I bear of my other origins. This does not, instance by instance, cause me any pain, but my experience of rejection has been an agony.

Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness

That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty

The moment ached, as if music were being played somewhere on an instrument whose strings had some connexion with her heart.

Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all.

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

But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn’t do anything to people but blame them for things they haven’t done? It will be like spending one’s whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper.

I was like a sea pulled by two moons. This must mean a boiling of the waters, tides that rushed up and carried away structures meant for living in, and then receded till earth that should be covered lay naked.

Literature is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

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

This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

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.

If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.