Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
[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
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
Limited
Atlantic
Range
Ponds
Size
Mills
Method
Shrinks
Ocean
Harmonious
Imagine
Jane
Mill
Believe
Smooth
Austen
Sensible
Pond
More quotes by Rebecca West
... 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
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.
Rebecca West
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
No great thing happens suddenly.
Rebecca West
It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West
The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
Rebecca West
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Rebecca West
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
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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
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
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
Rebecca West
it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Rebecca West
