274 Quotes by Rebecca West

The gardens were mystifying, inside the beautifully tended box hedges the flower-beds were choked with weeds, a single garden chair, made of white painted wire in the Victorian fashion, was set quite alone on a wide gravel space, with an air of deluded sociability, as if it had gone mad and thought that there were about it many other garden chairs.

I don’t believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one’s flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

If there is a God, I don’t think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn’t finished.

It’s my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it’s the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don’t see the urgency myself.

I realized that if I had said to them, “You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,” they would have nodded and said, “Yes,” and if I had gone on and said, “But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,” they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don’t complain, because I think my left hand’s power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

It isn’t only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.