Top 160 Rebecca West Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

3. “Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

— Rebecca West

4. “Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.”

— Rebecca West

5. “Unhappy people are dangerous.”

— Rebecca West

6. “It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.”

— Rebecca West

7. “No great thing happens suddenly.”

— Rebecca West

8. “Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.”

— Rebecca West

9. “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.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

11. “Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.”

— Rebecca West

12. “Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.”

— Rebecca West

13. “There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

16. “The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.”

— Rebecca West

17. “The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.”

— Rebecca West

18. “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.”

— Rebecca West

19. “The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.”

— Rebecca West

20. “If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’”

— Rebecca West

21. “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.”

— Rebecca West

22. “I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.”

— Rebecca West

23. “Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family.”

— Rebecca West

24. “Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.”

— Rebecca West

25. “Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

27. “It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.”

— Rebecca West

28. “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

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

— Rebecca West

30. “He is every other inch a gentleman.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

32. “Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.”

— Rebecca West

33. “The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.”

— Rebecca West

34. “Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

36. “Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

38. “Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”

— Rebecca West

39. “Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.”

— Rebecca West

40. “A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”

— Rebecca West

41. “There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

43. “Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

45. “The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.”

— Rebecca West

46. “There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.”

— Rebecca West

47. “Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.”

— Rebecca West

48. “I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.”

— Rebecca West

49. “The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.”

— Rebecca West

50. “I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.”

— Rebecca West