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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.

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
Race
Attempts
Individual
Panic
Fears
Gods
Placating
Painful
Stricken
Childhood
Avert
Sacrifice
Feared
Full
Sacrifices

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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 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.
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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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It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
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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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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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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.
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Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
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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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