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It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
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
Great
Even
Stretches
People
Lived
Exist
Dies
Living
Stills
Still
More quotes by Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
Unhappy people are dangerous.
Rebecca West
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
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.
Rebecca West
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
There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
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
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.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West
If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West
... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
Rebecca West
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
Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
Rebecca West
The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
[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
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
Rebecca West
