Quote

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

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
Survives
Astonishing
Misfortunes
Survival
Animal
Human
Humans

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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
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
Image
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
Image
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West
Image
Unhappy people are dangerous.
Rebecca West
Image
I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
Rebecca West
Image
If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West
Image
If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
Rebecca West
Image
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
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
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Rebecca West
Image
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
Rebecca West
Image
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
Image
... 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
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
Image
I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
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
Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
Rebecca West
Image
music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
Rebecca West