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
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.
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.
the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.
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.
I write books to find out about things.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.
The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.
There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.