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Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.
Rebecca West
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Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.
Rebecca West
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Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.
Rebecca West
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Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
Rebecca West
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No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.
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A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
Rebecca West
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
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Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
Rebecca West
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She drooped her eyelids and put on an expression that made her face look like an unmade bed.
Rebecca West
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Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.
Rebecca West
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I bought Henry a beautiful Daimler coupé, the first new car we have ever had, a tender antelope of a car.
Rebecca West
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Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.
Rebecca West
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All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.
Rebecca West
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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
Rebecca West
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Miss Beevor had made her playing at once much better and much worse, by giving her resolute fingers greater power to express her misunderstanding of sound.
Rebecca West
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I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
Rebecca West
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A lady once longed to be wild
But kept herself quite undefiled —
By thinking of Jesus
And veneral diseases —
And the danger of having a child.
Rebecca West
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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
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Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Rebecca West
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The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.
Rebecca West
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The aged are terrible — mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.
Rebecca West
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I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
Rebecca West
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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
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We think in youth that our bodies are identical with ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.
Rebecca West
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Rebecca West
Creative Commons
Born:
December 21, 1892
Died:
March 15, 1983
(aged 90)
Bio:
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer.
Known for:
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
The Return of the Soldier (1918)
The Fountain Overflows (1956)
A Train of Powder (1955)
Meaning of Treason (1947)
Most used words:
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people
human
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find
god
music
women
mind
write
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Rebecca West on Wikipedia
Rebecca West works on Gutenberg Project
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