Quote

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

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
Lasts
Experience
Nail
Give
Nails
Ever
Account
Giving
Accounts
Way
Poetry
Time
Fiction
Stop

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
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
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
Image
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Rebecca West
Image
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
Image
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
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
Image
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
Image
Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
Rebecca West
Image
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
Image
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
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
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
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
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Rebecca West
Image
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
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