Quote

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

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
Able
Opinion
Thinks
Suspension
Little
Age
Indeed
Reminds
Might
Point
View
Troubles
Always
Less
Behinds
Bridge
Mechanized
Thinking
Woman
Behind
Primitive
Poetical
Understand
Views
Bridges
Waterfall
Spirit
Environment
Correct
Inhabited
Littles
Trouble
Vast
Waterfalls

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Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.
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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
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Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
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A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
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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.
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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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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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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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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
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It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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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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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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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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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
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