Rebecca West Quotes - Page 2

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.

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.'

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

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

Unhappy people are dangerous.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

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

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

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.

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.

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

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.