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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.

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
Various
Seems
General
Sometimes
Normal
Mind
People
Ought
Bring
Districts
Feeling
Urgency
Feelings
Profession
Place

More quotes by Rebecca West

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domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
Rebecca West
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I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
Rebecca West
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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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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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
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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.
Rebecca West
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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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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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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
Rebecca West
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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
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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Rebecca West
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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
Rebecca West
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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
Rebecca West
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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
Rebecca West
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... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
Rebecca West
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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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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
Rebecca West
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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
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
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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