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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

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
Necessity
Luxury
Art

More quotes by Rebecca West

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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
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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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
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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 don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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[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
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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
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sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
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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
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The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
Rebecca West
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Rebecca West
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
Rebecca West
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West