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Rebecca West

31 quotes

“Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Training in Trucelence", in The Clarion, (14 February 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 157
“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics," in The Clarion, (14 November 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 219
“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tosh Horse," The New Statesman (1925); later included in Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928), ch. 11
“Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Strange Necessity,", in The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928); also quoted in "Art", in The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1996) edited by Rosalie Maggio
“There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Fabian Society (1928); also quoted in "Dame Rebecca West Dies in London", The New York Times (16 March 1983)
“It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Woman as Artist and Thinker" (1931)
“For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal" (1935)
“There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal," in Woman as Artist and Thinker, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005.
“I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War" (1937), edited by Nancy Cunard, reprinted in The Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986), edited by Valentine Cunningham
“The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (20 August 1959), as quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (1987), Part 5, Chapter 8, p. 206
“Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with The Sunday Telegraph, quoted in the Eugene Register-Guard (27 December 1972)
“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 (1892–1983) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, London (1975), and Rebecca West : A Life (1987) by Victoria Glendinning, p. xi
“After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, London (1981), and The Annual Obituary 1983 (1984) edited by Elizabeth Devine and Marion Stoker Morgan, p. 143
“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 (1892–1983) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "There is nothing like a dame: Dame Rebecca West at ninety," Vogue (February 1983)
“The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them, and attempt to create. So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things. To avoid the ordeal of emotion that leads to the conception is the impulse of death. Sterility is the deadly sin. Today so many of our activities are sterile. Our upper classes are impotent by reason of their soft living. Our lower classes have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours: they can only bear dead things.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Gospel According to Granville-Parker", in The Freewoman (7 March 1912); re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 21
“It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought. There is nothing more obvious about the post-war situation than that it is novel, springs from causes which have not yet been analysed, and cannot be relieved until this analysis is complete and has been made the basis of a new social formula. Yet persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal" (1935)
“There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I Believe", in I Believe : The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women Of Our Time (1939), edited by Clifton Fadiman
“These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man's most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any public form of work they chose to undertake — why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else's achievements unless they were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world that you can't now go around and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it. The remoteness of Americans from German attack had made them feel confident. They didn't really believe that anything could reach out and kill them. Americans are quite unconscious now that we look on them as just as much beaten as we are. They're quite unconscious of that. They have always talked of Vietnam as if by getting out they were surrendering the prospect of victory, as if they were being noble by renouncing the possibility of victory. But they couldn't have had a victory. They couldn't possibly have won.”
Rebecca West (1892–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source