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
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
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.'
Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
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.