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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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
Important
Think
Thinking
Concentrates
Hand
Written
Hands
Anything
More quotes by Rebecca West
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
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
In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
Rebecca West
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
Rebecca West
All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.
Rebecca West
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
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
Rebecca West
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
No great thing happens suddenly.
Rebecca West
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
Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
Rebecca West
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
