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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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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
Art
Poured
Form
Tasted
Life
Lifted
Adjustment
Cups
Necessity
Lips
Plaything
Essence
Decorative
More quotes by Rebecca West
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West
I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.
Rebecca West
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Rebecca West
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
Rebecca West
It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
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
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
