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

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He is every other inch a gentleman.
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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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The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
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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.
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But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
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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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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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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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Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
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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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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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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.
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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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Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
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