Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself. Rebecca West More Quotes by Rebecca West More Quotes From Rebecca West Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves. Rebecca West trustbelievepeople We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy. Rebecca West glassesrealwar works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously. Rebecca West walldoorsart Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain. Rebecca West doctorsbookyears 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 delightgraceart When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so! Rebecca West god The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family. Rebecca West bullybullyingfather Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word. Rebecca West catdoubtcomfort No great thing happens suddenly. Rebecca West great-thingschangehappens 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 childhoodsacrificerace A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. Rebecca West possibilityadultschildren The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved. Rebecca West divorcemenchildren Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought. Rebecca West destinyblownames 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 palateoystersplease The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup. Rebecca West foodmorningmean Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal. Rebecca West wisedogwriting [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 pondsoceanbelieve 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 weeping-willowsnarrativepages Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned. Rebecca West balancewinefundamentals Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her. Rebecca West egyptpyramidsthinking
