Explore Quotes by Rebecca West

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

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.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

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

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.

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.