Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Rebecca West
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 21
Died: 1983
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Suffragette
Writer
London
England
Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Sleep
Nations
Pears
Many
Sleepy
Men
Treason
Like
Veins
Rebellion
Soft
Drop
More quotes by Rebecca West
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
Rebecca West
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
Rebecca West
A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
Rebecca West
The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Rebecca West
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
Rebecca West
one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
Rebecca West
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
Rebecca West
Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
Rebecca West
I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
Rebecca West
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Rebecca West
... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
Rebecca West
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
Rebecca West
