Top 160 Rebecca West Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

107. “Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.”

— Rebecca West

108. “Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.”

— Rebecca West

109. “To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.”

— Rebecca West

110. “All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.”

— Rebecca West

111. “Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.”

— Rebecca West

112. “It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.”

— Rebecca West

113. “What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.”

— Rebecca West

114. “Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one’s flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.”

— Rebecca West

115. “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.”

— Rebecca West

116. “If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.”

— Rebecca West

117. “Destiny is another name for humanity’s half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.”

— Rebecca West

118. “The aged are terrible – mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.”

— Rebecca West

119. “A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.”

— Rebecca West

120. “I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It’s a lout’s game.”

— Rebecca West

121. “Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.”

— Rebecca West

122. “There are two kinds of imperialists – imperialists and bloody imperialists.”

— Rebecca West

123. “All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.”

— Rebecca West

124. “She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.”

— Rebecca West

125. “Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.”

— Rebecca West

126. “The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.”

— Rebecca West

127. “She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.”

— Rebecca West

128. “Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.”

— Rebecca West

129. “History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.”

— Rebecca West

130. “There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.”

— Rebecca West

131. “Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.”

— Rebecca West

132. “Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.”

— Rebecca West

133. “Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.”

— Rebecca West

134. “There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.”

— Rebecca West

135. “Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other’s nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.”

— Rebecca West

136. “It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.”

— Rebecca West

137. “Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.”

— Rebecca West

138. “Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.”

— Rebecca West

139. “The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one’s mere personal life, that one has merely lived.”

— Rebecca West

140. “Here was the authentic voice of the Slav. These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.”

— Rebecca West

141. “The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.”

— Rebecca West

142. “I realized that if I had said to them, “You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,” they would have nodded and said, “Yes,” and if I had gone on and said, “But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,” they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.”

— Rebecca West

143. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

— Rebecca West

144. “The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.”

— Rebecca West

145. “Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.”

— Rebecca West

146. “Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.”

— Rebecca West

147. “I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.”

— Rebecca West

148. “There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.”

— Rebecca West

149. “Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.”

— Rebecca West

150. “If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.”

— Rebecca West