Quotes by Rebecca West

“[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ide...”

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

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

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

“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 will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and ...”

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

“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”

“Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learn...”

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

“Yes, said Mamma, this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship,...”

“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 ones own existence h...”

“Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of t...”

“She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.”

“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”

“Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; wat...”

“Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.”

“The word idiot comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed ...”

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

“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”