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

More quotes by Rebecca West

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The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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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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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
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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.
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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.
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
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[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
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It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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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.
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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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No great thing happens suddenly.
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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.
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Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
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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.
Rebecca West