Rebecca West Quotes

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Rebecca West

Profession : Author

Birth : December 21, 1892

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

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

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

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

I write books to find out about things.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

Rebecca West

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

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

Rebecca West

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

Rebecca West

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

Rebecca West

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

Rebecca West