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Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

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
Writing
Affairs
Love
Affair
People
Anybody
Difficult
Reckoned
Write
Considers
Truth
Biography
Many
Sits
Real
Biographies

More quotes by Rebecca West

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The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
Rebecca West
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
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Unhappy people are dangerous.
Rebecca West
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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.
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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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?
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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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
Rebecca West
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
Rebecca West
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A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
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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For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
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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sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca West