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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

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
Respect
Earth
Even
Rubbed
Salt
Wounds
Likes
Nobody

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All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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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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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
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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.
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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
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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.
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But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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