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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

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
Glorious
Father

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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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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
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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.
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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
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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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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.
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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 astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
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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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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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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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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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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.
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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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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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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.
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