Top 160 Rebecca West Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener’s attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.”

— Rebecca West

52. “I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?”

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

— Rebecca West

57. “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

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

— Rebecca West

59. “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

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

— Rebecca West

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Rebecca West

73. “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

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

76. “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

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

— Rebecca West

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Rebecca West

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Rebecca West

85. “Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.”

— Rebecca West

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Rebecca West

92. “I’ve never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can’t see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

94. “Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.”

— Rebecca West

95. “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

96. “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

97. “In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

99. “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

100. “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