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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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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
Lasts
Nail
Experience
Give
Nails
Ever
Account
Giving
Accounts
Way
Poetry
Time
Fiction
Stop

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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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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It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
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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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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
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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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The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
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To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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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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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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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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