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If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

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
Tell
Stills
Still
Kiss
Pray
Kissing
Praying

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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
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But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
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Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
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The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.
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It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
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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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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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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
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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?
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All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
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.
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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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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