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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
Kiss
Pray
Kissing
Praying
Tell
Stills
Still

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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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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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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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Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.
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Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
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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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There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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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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the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
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it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Rebecca West
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If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.
Rebecca West