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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?

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
Novels
Meet
Novel
Wonder
Wrong
People
Unwritten
Composing

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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
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She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
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it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
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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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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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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.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
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[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
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Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
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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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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.
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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.
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