Rebecca West Quotes
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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.
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It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
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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.
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Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.
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I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.
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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.
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The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.
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Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
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... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
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I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?
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Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.
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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.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.
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I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.
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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.
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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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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.
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What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.
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The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.
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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
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All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.
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[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.
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Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
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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.
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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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.
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