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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.

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
Woman
Liked
Individual
Luck
Certain
Western
Disliked
Women
Sex
Worshipped
Sometimes
Civilization
Civilizations
Even
Conditions
Persecuted
Loved
Reasonable
Common
Condition

More quotes by Rebecca West

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Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
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The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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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.
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The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
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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.
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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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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
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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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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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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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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.
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When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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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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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Rebecca West
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Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
Rebecca West
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West