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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
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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
Well
Seemed
Whole
Race
Good
Idea
Time
Ideas
Headstone
Like
Wells
Epitaph
Might
Grave
Human
Graves
Humans
Lays
More quotes by Rebecca West
It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
Rebecca West
No great thing happens suddenly.
Rebecca West
The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
Rebecca West
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Rebecca West
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
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
Rebecca West
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
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
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
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
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
Rebecca West
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
Rebecca West
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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
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
... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
Rebecca West
If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
Rebecca West
