A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
– Rebecca West
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.
– Rebecca West
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
– Rebecca West
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
– 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
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
– Rebecca West
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
– Rebecca West
He was every other inch a gentleman.
– Rebecca West
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
– Rebecca West
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: It seemed a good idea at the time.
– Rebecca West
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
– Rebecca West
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.
– Rebecca West
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
– Rebecca West
She was like the embodiment of all women who have felt an astonished protest because their children have died before them.
– Rebecca West
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
– Rebecca West
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
– 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
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
– Rebecca West
It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
– Rebecca West
There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
– Rebecca West
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
– 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
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
– Rebecca West
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
– Rebecca West
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.