Quote

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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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
Happens
Acts
Certain
Madness
Make
Commit
Recognize
Foresee
Happen
Seized
Upon
Dread
Future
Tragic
Often
Forced

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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
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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.
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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No great thing happens suddenly.
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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.
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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.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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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.
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... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
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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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
Rebecca West