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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.

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
Modern
Monkeys
Pleasure
Error
Literature
Contemporary
Read
Absurd
Shouldn
Errors
English
Monkey
Taught
Curriculum

More quotes by Rebecca West

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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
Rebecca West
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
Rebecca West
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West
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The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
Rebecca West
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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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sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca West
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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
Rebecca West
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Rebecca West
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A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
Rebecca West
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domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
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If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
Rebecca West
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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
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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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
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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