Quote

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

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
Living
Stills
Still
Great
Even
Stretches
People
Lived
Exist
Dies

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
Rebecca West
Image
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
Rebecca West
Image
She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
Rebecca West
Image
Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
Rebecca West
Image
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
Image
In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
Rebecca West
Image
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
Image
music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
Rebecca West
Image
I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
Rebecca West
Image
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
Image
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
Image
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
Image
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
Image
The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.
Rebecca West
Image
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
Image
There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
Rebecca West