Top 160 Rebecca West Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.”

— Rebecca West

52. “Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.”

— Rebecca West

53. “I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.”

— Rebecca West

54. “A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.”

— Rebecca West

55. “All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.”

— Rebecca West

56. “Reason’s a thing we dimly see in sleep.”

— Rebecca West

57. “There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.”

— Rebecca West

58. “To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.”

— Rebecca West

59. “Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.”

— Rebecca West

60. “Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.”

— Rebecca West

61. “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

62. “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

63. “If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.”

— Rebecca West

64. “I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.”

— Rebecca West

65. “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 one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.”

— Rebecca West

66. “Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.”

— Rebecca West

67. “International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.”

— Rebecca West

68. “It’s my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it’s the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don’t see the urgency myself.”

— Rebecca West

69. “Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.”

— Rebecca West

70. “To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.”

— Rebecca West

71. “When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!”

— Rebecca West

72. “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.”

— Rebecca West

73. “It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn’t room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.”

— Rebecca West

74. “If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.”

— Rebecca West

75. “For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.”

— Rebecca West

76. “In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.”

— Rebecca West

77. “I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.”

— Rebecca West

78. “I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty – which is the basis of communism.”

— Rebecca West

79. “Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer’s Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.”

— Rebecca West

80. “The gardens were mystifying, inside the beautifully tended box hedges the flower-beds were choked with weeds, a single garden chair, made of white painted wire in the Victorian fashion, was set quite alone on a wide gravel space, with an air of deluded sociability, as if it had gone mad and thought that there were about it many other garden chairs.”

— Rebecca West

81. “The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.”

— Rebecca West

82. “I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don’t complain, because I think my left hand’s power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.”

— Rebecca West

83. “The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup...”

— Rebecca West

84. “Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.”

— Rebecca West

85. “Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.”

— Rebecca West

86. “Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.”

— Rebecca West

87. “The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.”

— Rebecca West

88. “Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.”

— Rebecca West

89. “Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.”

— Rebecca West

90. “It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.”

— Rebecca West

91. “It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.”

— Rebecca West

92. “A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.”

— Rebecca West

93. “It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.”

— Rebecca West

94. “I don’t believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.”

— Rebecca West

95. “She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.”

— Rebecca West

96. “All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.”

— Rebecca West

97. “The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented with abstract designs in chocolate, grey, and bottle-green, such as Western plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark green printed velvet used in wagons-lits.”

— Rebecca West

98. “He is in his late sixties, but has the charm of extreme youth, for he comes to a pleasure and hails it happily for what it is without any bitterness accumulated from past disappointments, and he believes that any moment the whole process of life may make a slight switch-over and that everything will be agreeable for ever. His manners would satisfy the standards of any capital in the world, but at the same time he is exquisitely, pungently local.”

— Rebecca West

99. “We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.”

— Rebecca West

100. “I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.”

— Rebecca West