Rebecca West

Memory is the only thing that binds your life together. The rest drifts in a stream of unimportant people and incidents, and upon such as these, a man may draw the line of oblivion.

I had never seen a man who looked as much like a savior. And no doubt if I had found him in any other place than this I should have been a little afraid of him.

There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.

I cannot keep it out of my mind that a man so engaging, so entertaining, so well informed, should have been so low down in my esteem.

It was not very long before I began to wonder why I had ever hated him.

One could turn his back on the world, but one couldn't turn his back on his own nature.

He has no story to tell, none of us have, but our lives are little stories, and the tale is not so often in the telling as in the living.

It is a cruel, ironical thing that he was not more to me, and I to him, for we have lived such an eternity together, and I never knew.

The trouble with everyone is that they're not just a piece of paper with a date written on it. They're what they've been every day of their lives.

It is possible to love people very much and think them ridiculous.

If only one could make life a little more precious to people, if only one could remind them that there is a war on!

I have often felt a great deal of pity for people who suffer, but I have been embarrassed by it, and so I have had to pretend not to see them.