Quote

... 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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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
Wells
Fruit
Branch
Without
Darkness
Jewels
Temps
Well
Hand
Accurate
Horned
Long
Growing
Error
Fumbling
Like
Eye
Branches
Ulysses
Perfect
Reaching
Jewel
Beautiful
Errors
Pluck
Hands
Fingers
Doubted

More quotes by Rebecca West

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Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Rebecca West
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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
Rebecca West
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Rebecca West
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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
Rebecca West
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The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.
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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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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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.
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.
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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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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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.
Rebecca West
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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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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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 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.
Rebecca West
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
Rebecca West