Rebecca West

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

— Rebecca West

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

— Rebecca West

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

— Rebecca West

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

— Rebecca West

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

— Rebecca West

Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community.

— Rebecca West

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

— Rebecca West

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

— Rebecca West

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.

— Rebecca West

It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.

— Rebecca West

For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.

— Rebecca West

There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.

— Rebecca West

I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.

— Rebecca West

The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

— Rebecca West

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

— Rebecca West

Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it.

— Rebecca West

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.

— Rebecca West

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

— Rebecca West

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

— Rebecca West

The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

— Rebecca West

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

— Rebecca West

To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.

— Rebecca West

She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.

— Rebecca West

She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form.

— Rebecca West

If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.

— Rebecca West

It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible.

— Rebecca West

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

— Rebecca West

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

— Rebecca West