Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder, her coverage of the...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth21 December 1892
CountryIreland
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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.
Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.