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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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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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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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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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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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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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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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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
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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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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 isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
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All gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm.
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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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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.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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