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

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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
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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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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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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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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.
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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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.
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I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
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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.
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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?
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Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
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It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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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.
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He is every other inch a gentleman.
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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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