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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

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
Gestures
Imperfect
Relationships
International
Based
Knowledge
Preordained
Clumsy

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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.
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
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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 adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
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It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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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.
Rebecca West
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Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are 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.
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West