“Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality[.]”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes flattened: "We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, 'Help me, old man; I've got no legs!' and I had to answer, 'I can't, old man; I've got no hands!'" Well, such are the dreams of Englishwomen to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for the return of our soldier.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“For a long time we watched her as she went along the drive, her yellowish raincoat looking sick and bright in the sharp sunshine, her black plumes nodding like the pines above, her cheap boots making her walk on her heels, a spreading stain on the fabric of our life.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Some wounded soldiers who came out to sit in the sun were rather rude because I was not in khaki, even when I explained that I was a priest of God and that the feeling of the bishops was strongly against the enlistment of the clergy. I do feel that the church has lost its grip on the masses.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“I reflected, while Kitty wept, how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to lovers innumerable things do not matter.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, "Heartless Fraud on Soldier's Wife." Presently she would say that she had gone to some expense to come here with her news and that she was poor, and at the first generous look on our faces there would come some tale of trouble that would disgust the imagination by pictures of yellow-wood furniture that a landlord oddly desired to seize and a pallid child with bandages round its throat. I cast down my eyes and shivered at the horror.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“And as that she was nearer to him than at any other time. That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“But all the streets are long and red and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stand little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“I have often seen people grouped like that on the common outside our gates on Bank holidays. Most often the man has a handkerchief over his face to shade him from the sun, and the woman squats beside him and peers through the undergrowth to see that the children come to no harm as they play. It has sometimes seemed to me that there was a significance about it. You know when one goes into the damp, odorous coolness of a church in a Catholic country and sees the kneeling worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like a sword, and one says to oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes there is an end to the world.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“Perché mai la vita moderna ha generato orrori al cui confronto le vecchie tragedie sembrano spettacoli per bambini? Forse perché l'umanità in cerca di avventura ha cambiato troppo il mondo esterno che genera la vita.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“L'indifferenza significa che gli occhi non hanno più bisogno di cercarsi, le mani di protendersi; né le labbra di unirsi, perché è un'unione in cui non ci si accorge più della separazione dei corpi.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“There were only two real people in the world, Chris and this woman whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room, and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
“This does not mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation; it means that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitos.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier
Rebecca West
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date December 21, 1892
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“I pushed away my dessert, suddenly no longer hungry. Resentment had a way of filling up your stomach.”
― Marlene Perez, quote from Dead Is the New Black
“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“I want my name to mean something after I’m dead.”
― V.C. Andrews, quote from Heaven
“You’re spending a lot of time with this girl.”
“Whoa!” I stepped out of the shower, buck -ass naked, finding Ollie standing in the doorway of the bathroom. “What the hell, man?”
“What?” He shrugged. “Not like I haven’t seen your junk before.”
― J. Lynn, quote from Trust in Me
“This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nations-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. The Monarchy, our Monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian peoples. Our Emperor is a secular brother of the Pope, he is His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty; no other is as apostolic, no other majesty in Europe is as dependent on the Grace of God and on the faith of the peoples in the Grace of God… The Emperor of Austria-Hungary must not be abandoned by God.”
― Joseph Roth, quote from The Radetzky March
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