Quote

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

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
Bring
Districts
Feeling
Urgency
Feelings
Profession
Place
Various
Seems
General
Sometimes
Normal
Mind
People
Ought

More quotes by 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
Image
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West
Image
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca West
Image
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West
Image
He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
Image
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
Image
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
Image
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
Image
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
Rebecca West
Image
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
Image
When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
Rebecca West
Image
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
Image
The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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
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
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
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
Image
[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
Rebecca West