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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

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
Ever
Feel
Feels
Bloody
Revolution
Wealth
Rich
Poor

More quotes by Rebecca West

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Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?
Rebecca West
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... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
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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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 is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
Rebecca West
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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
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If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange.
Rebecca West
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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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The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
Rebecca West
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
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