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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
Thought
Thing
Repulsive
Good
Pretence
Founded
Proper
Price
Western
Pain

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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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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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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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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.
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It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
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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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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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Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
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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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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
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He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
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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.
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domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
Rebecca West
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She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
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For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
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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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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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