Quote

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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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
Lips
Plaything
Essence
Decorative
Poured
Art
Tasted
Form
Lifted
Life
Adjustment
Cups
Necessity

More quotes by Rebecca West

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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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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.
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After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.
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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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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 unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
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The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
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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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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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