“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
Source: The Fountain Overflows
Rebecca West:
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Rebecca West: Citations en anglais
"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.
Variante: 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
This has also appeared in paraphrased form as: "If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished."
The Paris Review interview (1981)
“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”
"The Tosh Horse," The New Statesman (1925); later included in Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928), ch. 11
“The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person.”
Rebecca West
livre
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)<!-- as quoted in [http://books.google.mk/books?id=5G1XAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16 Khatru Symposium: Women in Science Fiction (1975; 1993) by Jeanne Gomoll -->
Contexte: The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
"The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal" (1935)
Contexte: It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought. There is nothing more obvious about the post-war situation than that it is novel, springs from causes which have not yet been analysed, and cannot be relieved until this analysis is complete and has been made the basis of a new social formula. Yet persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.
Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VII
Contexte: These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man's most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any public form of work they chose to undertake — why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else's achievements unless they were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did.
"The Salt of the Earth"
Source: The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels (1935)
Source: The Book Of Military Quotations
As quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, London (1975), and Rebecca West : A Life (1987) by Victoria Glendinning, p. xi
Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VII
Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 13
Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 17
“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.”
Letter (20 August 1959), as quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (1987), Part 5, Chapter 8, p. 206
"The Gospel According to Granville-Parker", in The Freewoman (7 March 1912); re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 21
Quoted in "There is nothing like a dame: Dame Rebecca West at ninety," Vogue (February 1983)
Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter I
As quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, London (1981), and The Annual Obituary 1983 (1984) edited by Elizabeth Devine and Marion Stoker Morgan, p. 143
"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
"A Training in Trucelence", in The Clarion, (14 February 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 157.
Speech to the Fabian Society (1928) "Dame Rebecca West Dies in London" http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-obit.html, The New York Times (16 March 1983)
"Woman as Artist and Thinker" (1931)
Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VI
