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
We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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.