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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
More quotes by Rebecca West
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
There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
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
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.
Rebecca West
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca West
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.
Rebecca West
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
The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
Rebecca West
[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
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
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
Rebecca West
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
Rebecca West
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca West
