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

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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
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The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
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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.
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No great thing happens suddenly.
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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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.
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
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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.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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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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Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
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