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The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

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
Arbitrary
Performance
Performances
Seemed
Divine
Redemptive
Longer
Claimed
Grace
Credible
Power
Respectable

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I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
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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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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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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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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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God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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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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music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven.
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Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
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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 main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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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 [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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The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
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When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.
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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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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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