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

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
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

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West

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

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Rebecca West

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

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
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

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

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

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
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

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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

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

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West