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The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund QUOTES

The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund QUOTES

1 " It appeared possible that these other men were good fathers only because they knew too little of the world to grow frenzied against it. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

2 " I was like a sea pulled by two moons. This must mean a boiling of the waters, tides that rushed up and carried away structures meant for living in, and then receded till earth that should be covered lay naked. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

3 " What a gamble it is to have children! "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

4 " Human relations are essentially imperfect. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

5 " It was one of those autumn mornings which are devoid of melancholy, when the weather seems to be cleaning its house. A broom of wind sent the clouds above flying briskly and kept the fallen leaves scudding along the pavements, the trees looked as if they were being stripped to let the rains get at them better. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

6 " It seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

7 " When we talked to them we always expressed the love we felt for them and never made the chilling remarks which the part of us undesirous of friendship sometimes tricked us into making to those who might possibly have become our friends. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

8 " Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

9 " That is the great handicap of sexual love, that lovers can share everything except what explains the past, of which their enjoyment is a part. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

10 " But our grief was useless. Salt water, spilled on the ground, does not feed what grows there, but kills it. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

11 " Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

12 " I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance. Everything enjoyable had an equal value. In life we were not divided. Life itself was not divided. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

13 " Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

14 " You should smile at that,’ he said. ‘There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

15 " But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn’t do anything to people but blame them for things they haven’t done? It will be like spending one’s whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

16 " Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

17 " They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had to repeat old jokes because it could no longer invent new ones, and speak of virtues in phrases so worn by use that they gave the same feeling of want as rags. "

― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund