Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder, her coverage of the...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth21 December 1892
CountryIreland
Rebecca West quotes about
Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
[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.
When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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.
his smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth ...
There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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.
If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.
There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.
Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.
The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.