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
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.
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.
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.
If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.
Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.
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.
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.