Quote

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

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
Foretaste
Flesh
Diverted
Spent
Casino
Hour
Casinos
Hours
Worm
Purpose
Worms
Death
Gambling
Given
Time
Purposes

More quotes by Rebecca West

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It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
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It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
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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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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
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a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.
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The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Rebecca West
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
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.
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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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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
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Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
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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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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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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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West