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The law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
Rebecca West
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
Rebecca West
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We love people, and we say that we were going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
Rebecca West
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She was wilting, withering, diminishing, though she still spelt magnificence, as a word retains the same meaning even if it be printed in smaller and smaller type.
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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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.
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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.
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Were I to…take a [Yugoslav] peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in turn into his father, I would never hear the word 'yes' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years.
Rebecca West
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What, did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to cats.
Rebecca West
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I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
Rebecca West
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Rebecca West
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When the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.
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Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.
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Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
Rebecca West
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A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.
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Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.
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)
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Rebecca West works on Gutenberg Project
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