Rebecca West Quotes - Page 6

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

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.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.