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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
Novel
Wonder
Wrong
People
Unwritten
Composing
Novels
Meet

More quotes by Rebecca West

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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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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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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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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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Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
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The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
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It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
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Unhappy people are dangerous.
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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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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
Rebecca West
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I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
Rebecca West
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West
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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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... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West