"[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."
- Rebecca West
"Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all."
"For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition."
"Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips."
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all."
"Nothing succeeds like failure."
"There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time."
"Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth."
"I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value."
"Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen."
- Dame Rebecca West