Quote

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

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
Use
Tests
Take
Value
Cause
Sickly
Present
Doubtful
Causes
Frankly
Pleasure
Prime
Society
Confusion
Values
Test

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.
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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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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Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
Rebecca West
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The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
Rebecca West
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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.
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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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
Rebecca West
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
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It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
Rebecca West