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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

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
Thing
Repulsive
Good
Pretence
Founded
Proper
Price
Western
Pain
Thought

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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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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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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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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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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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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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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.
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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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He is every other inch a gentleman.
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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 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.
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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
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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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Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.
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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.
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