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

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at…

— Rebecca West

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give…

— Rebecca West

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

— 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

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But…

— Rebecca West

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at…

— Rebecca West

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to…

— Rebecca West

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

— Rebecca West

“As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known…

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

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

— Rebecca West

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, She doesn't have…

— 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

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

— Rebecca West

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people.…

— 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

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

— Rebecca West

“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”

— Rebecca West

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of…

— Rebecca West

“Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack…

— Rebecca West

“The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then…

— 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

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people…

— Rebecca West

The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.

— Rebecca West