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 Quote

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
- Rebecca West Quote

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

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

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 Quote

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
- Rebecca West Quote

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
- Rebecca West Quote

He was every other inch a gentleman.
- Rebecca West Quote

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
- Rebecca West Quote

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 Quote

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

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
- Rebecca West Quote

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
- Rebecca West Quote

It is queer how it is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
- Rebecca West Quote

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
- Rebecca West Quote

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
- Rebecca West Quote

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 Quote

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
- Rebecca West Quote

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
- Rebecca West Quote

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
- Rebecca West Quote

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 Quote

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

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

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
- Rebecca West Quote

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

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
- Rebecca West Quote