Rebecca West Quotes

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

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music

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

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Life, Soul

  Tags in Nobility, Adventure, Desire

• There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male s*x except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Who is there in that lot one would want as a father, except perhaps Mrs Thatcher? That choice would be irregular but safe.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I have horrible nightmares of Sir Almwroth Wright’s limp sentences wandering through the arid desert of his mind looking for dropped punctuation marks.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• We have asked men for votes, they have given us advice. At present they are also giving us abuse.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I saw in my own education some of the things which eat the power out of women.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilisation has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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, or a prostitute.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feminism, Women

• 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

  Topics in Love, Truth

  Tags in Biography, Just, Writing

• Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Cat

• I write books to find out about things.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, Book

• It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Soul

  Tags in Right, Desire

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

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Live, Die

• All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like, Men

• The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women, Men

• There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Conversation

• We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Comfort

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

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Person, Communication

• Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

  Rebecca West

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, Taste, Man

Rebecca West (46)

Birth:	21st December, 1892
Death:	15th March, 1983
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Writer

About

Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman.

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Today's Anniversary - 2nd November

Births

• 1922 - Barber B. Conable Jr.
• 1755 - Marie Antoinette
• 1942 - Stefanie Powers
• 1965 - Shahrukh Khan
• 1974 - Nelly

Deaths

• 1975 - Pier Paolo Pasolini
• 1970 - Richard Cardinal Cushing
• 2004 - Theo van Gogh
• 2000 - Robert Edmond Cormier
• 1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem