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 WestRead
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the speaker's assertion of her identity and agency, distancing herself from passive roles.
Rebecca West's quote emphasizes her vocal stance on feminism, illustrating that expressing individuality and rejecting submissive roles can lead others to label her as a feminist. It points to the societal challenges women face when they assert their rights and identities, often leading to being stereotyped or dismissed.
Themes
FeminismIdentityAgencyEmpowermentIndividuality
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about women's rights, one might say, 'As Rebecca West pointed out, being called a feminist is a recognition of one's agency.'
More from Rebecca West
All quotes βworks 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.
Rebecca WestRead
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca WestRead
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.
Rebecca WestRead
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.
Rebecca WestRead
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca WestRead
Similar quotes
We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.
Camille PagliaRead
Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that
Vivian GornickRead
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
A. S. ByattRead
Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.
Gloria SteinemRead
Beyonce is not above critique. As a feminist herself, I hope Beyonce would welcome it.
Roxane GayRead
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
Bell HooksRead