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... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

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
Never
Instantly
Unnecessary
Followed
Period
Killing
Periods
Necessary
History
Killings

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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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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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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
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No great thing happens suddenly.
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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?
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
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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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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
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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
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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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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
Rebecca West
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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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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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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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.
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