Quote

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.

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
Make
Eats
Good
Revolt
Please
Dead
Though
Acutely
Cannot
Oyster
Ever
Palate
Live
Oysters

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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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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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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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In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
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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.
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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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.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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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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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
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