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I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

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
Feels
Pardon
Believe
Forgiveness
Necessarily
Forget
Understand
Makes
Cannot
Feel

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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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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.
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sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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[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.
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it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
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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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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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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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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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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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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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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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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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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West