Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE (1892–1983,) better known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She 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 Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the “Aubrey trilogy” of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her “indisputably the world’s number one woman writer” in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
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Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Grieving, Grief
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Communication
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Biography, Legacy
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Confidence, Foresight
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Experience
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Challenges, Journalism, Space
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself
—Rebecca West
Topics: Humanity
In England and America, a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe, it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Vanity
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Respect
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Criticism, Critics, Audiences
She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Medicine
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Revolution
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Friendship
Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Correction, Reform
Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other’s nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.
—Rebecca West
It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Soul, Master, Desire, Passion
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful frankly to use pleasure as a test of value.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Pleasure
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
—Rebecca West
Topics: People
He is every other inch a gentleman.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Men
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
Topics: Gossip
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Men & Women, Friends and Friendship, Men, Women
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Mothers
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Simplicity, Truth
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Hypocrisy
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Conversation
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
Topics: Music
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.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Women, Feminism
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology
—Rebecca West
Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
—Rebecca West
Topics: Birds
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