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.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

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

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

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.

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

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

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

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

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

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.