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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
Kissing
Praying
Tell
Stills
Still
Kiss
Pray

More quotes by Rebecca West

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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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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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A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
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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.
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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... 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.
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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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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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No great thing happens suddenly.
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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 astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
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I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
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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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Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.
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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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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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Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.
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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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The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.
Rebecca West
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Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies that a city knows not whom it entertains.
Rebecca West