Rebecca West quotes

Rebecca West was a British author, journalist, and literary critic renowned for her sharp intellect and versatile writing. Her works often explored politics, feminism, and contemporary culture. She established herself as one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. Here are 75 of her quotes:

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

Rebecca West

The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

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.

Rebecca West

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

Rebecca West

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

Rebecca West

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

Rebecca West

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Rebecca West

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.

Rebecca West

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

Rebecca West

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

Rebecca West

There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.

Rebecca West

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West