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
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.
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
He is every other inch a gentleman.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.