"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
Read quote
90 likes
Quote collection
Rebecca West quotes (page 1 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
77 likes
"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse."
Read quote
71 likes
"The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots."
Read quote
60 likes
"There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence."
Read quote
55 likes
"Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct."
Read quote
34 likes
"Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility."
Read quote
26 likes
"All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears."
Read quote
26 likes
"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning."
Read quote
26 likes
"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple."
Read quote
24 likes
"The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus."
Read quote
21 likes
"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind."
Read quote
20 likes
"Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity."
Read quote
20 likes
"It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
Read quote
19 likes
"Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience."
Read quote
19 likes
"Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman."
Read quote
19 likes
"Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck."
Read quote
18 likes
"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."
Read quote
17 likes
"Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle."
Read quote
17 likes
"You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is."
Read quote
17 likes