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

More quotes by Rebecca West

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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
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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.
Rebecca West
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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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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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.
Rebecca West
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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
Rebecca West
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After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Rebecca West
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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
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Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
Rebecca West
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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West