Rebecca West

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.

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

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

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

Existence in itself taken at its least miraculous is a miracle.

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.

I write books to find out about things.

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

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

Time spent in a casino is time given to death a foretaste of the hour when ones flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

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

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

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.

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

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

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

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

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

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

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

Unfortunately all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves and not with laughing gas either.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

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.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

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

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

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

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth .

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

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

It is the souls duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

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.

The bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.

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

Journalism an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

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.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

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.