Rebecca West: Quotes about people

Rebecca West was British feminist and author. Explore interesting quotes on people.
Rebecca West: 76   quotes 1   like

“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

Rebecca West

"Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics," in The Clarion, (14 November 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 219.
Variant: I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Source: Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

People

“There was 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
People , Time

“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

As quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, London (1975), and Rebecca West : A Life (1987) by Victoria Glendinning, p. xi

People

“I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.”

Rebecca West

Quoted in "There is nothing like a dame: Dame Rebecca West at ninety," Vogue (February 1983)

Death , People , Fear , Imagination

“But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.”

Rebecca West

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter I

Life , People , Alcohol , Fear

“I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.”

Rebecca West

"Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War" (1937), edited by Nancy Cunard, reprinted in The Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986), edited by Valentine Cunningham

People , Support , Happiness