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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.

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
Copy
Copies
Required
Humor
Funny
Universe
Art
Ample
Things
Damned

More quotes by Rebecca West

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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
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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.
Rebecca West
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Rebecca West
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
Rebecca West
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He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
Rebecca West
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It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
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It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West
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Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.
Rebecca West
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Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
Rebecca West
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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
Rebecca West