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.”

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

“He is every other inch a gentleman.”

“Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.”

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

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

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

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

“All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”

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

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

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

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

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

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