Rebecca West

"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 wil…"

"There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens t…"

"That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marryin…"

"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 de…"

"Rebecca West, The Art of Fiction No. 65" by Marina Warner, in The Paris Review"

"She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vice…"

"West's novel The Return of the Soldier"

"Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it."