274 Quotes by Rebecca West

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

Her outflung hand turned over in the air. The gesture it described was infinitesimal, but it made Corrie draw in his breath and for the first time consider the possibility that perhaps the final emotion he might feel for his wife was hate. -Life Sentence.

Here was the authentic voice of the Slav. These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.

It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn’t room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.

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

I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty – which is the basis of communism.

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.’

Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer’s Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.