Rebecca West quotes:

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again.

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

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

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

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.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

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.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct."

Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

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.

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

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

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

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

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

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

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

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

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

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

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.

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

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

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

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

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

... 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.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

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

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.

... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.

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

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.

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.

one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

... 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.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

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

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

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

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

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.

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

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.

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

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.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is a cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.

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

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.

Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

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.

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

For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

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

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

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

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

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.

I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.