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

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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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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.
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After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.
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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
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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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Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
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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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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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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
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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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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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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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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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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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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