Rebecca West

“Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”

“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.”

“But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.”

“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”

“People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.”

“Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”

“Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.”

“Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.”

“I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

“To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.”

“It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.”

“Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.”

“It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.”

“He is every other inch a gentleman.”

“[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.”

“There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.”

“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”

“There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.”

“I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?”

“Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality[.]”