Quote

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

Rebecca West

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Rebecca West
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 21
Died: 1983
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Suffragette
Writer
London
England
Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Tell
Hatred
Away
Bears
Hands
Places
Best
Cutting
Things
Dead
Revere
Men
Dark
Lamp
Life
Hate
Lamps
Strong
Bear

More quotes by Rebecca West

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... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
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Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
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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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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
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I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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No great thing happens suddenly.
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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.
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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Rebecca West
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domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
Rebecca West
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Unhappy people are dangerous.
Rebecca West
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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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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If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
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The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West