Quotes by 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...”

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

“But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they ...”

“To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.”

“She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.”

“That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marr...”

“These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved ...”

“One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which...”

“She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the v...”

“I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world ...”

“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.”

“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...”