It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

- Rebecca West

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

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

I write books to find out about things.

- Rebecca West

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

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

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

- Rebecca West

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

- Rebecca West

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West

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

- Rebecca West