Quote

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

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
Time
Poems
Ballads
Plain
Narratives
Narrative
Hardy
Pages
Collected
Married
Thomas
Simply
Weeping
Form
Ancestors
Ballad
Must
Ancestor
Willow

More quotes by 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
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
Image
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
Rebecca West
Image
... 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
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 principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
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
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
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
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
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
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
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
Image
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
Rebecca West
Image
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
Image
No great thing happens suddenly.
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
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
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 strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca West