Quote

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

Rebecca West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Banned
Corny
Censorship
Sarcastic
Practice
Funny
Indefensible
Women
Infanticide
Book
Forbid

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
Image
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.
Rebecca West
Image
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
Rebecca West
Image
music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
Rebecca West
Image
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
Image
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
Image
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
Image
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
Rebecca West
Image
... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
Rebecca West
Image
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.
Rebecca West
Image
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Rebecca West
Image
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
Image
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
Rebecca West
Image
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.
Rebecca West
Image
The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
Rebecca West
Image
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
Image
Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
Rebecca West
Image
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 West
Image
Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
Rebecca West
Image
I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
Rebecca West