274 Quotes by Rebecca West

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air.

Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness

Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.

...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.

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.