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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

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
Soft
Drop
Sleep
Nations
Pears
Many
Sleepy
Men
Treason
Like
Veins
Rebellion

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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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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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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
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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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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
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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.
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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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