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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
Give
Nails
Ever
Account
Giving
Accounts
Way
Poetry
Time
Fiction
Stop
Lasts
Experience
Nail
More quotes by Rebecca West
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
Rebecca West
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
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West
In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
Rebecca West
He is every other inch a gentleman.
Rebecca West
Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
Rebecca West
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
Rebecca West
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
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
Rebecca West
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
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca West
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
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
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West
The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Rebecca West
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Rebecca West
