Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

“Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...

— Rebecca West

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

— Rebecca West

it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance…

— Rebecca West

My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with…

— Rebecca West

I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there…

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or…

— Rebecca West

To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits…

— Rebecca West

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature…

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words,…

— Rebecca West

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake…

— Rebecca West

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old…

— Rebecca West

One perceives that again and again she has destroyed her life when it was forming into shapes of happiness because of her…

— Rebecca West

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is…

— Rebecca West

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the…

— Rebecca West

“They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had…

— Rebecca West

Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way…

— Rebecca West

“People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.”

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

“My work expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don’t believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that…

— Rebecca West

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that…

— Rebecca West

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material…

— Rebecca West

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which…

— Rebecca West

“I was like a sea pulled by two moons. This must mean a boiling of the waters, tides that rushed up and…

— Rebecca West

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding…

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating…

— Rebecca West

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from…

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make…

— Rebecca West

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by…

— Rebecca West

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but…

— Rebecca West

one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which…

— Rebecca West