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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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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
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I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.
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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.
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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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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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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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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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He is every other inch a gentleman.
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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
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domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
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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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Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
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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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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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I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
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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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... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
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International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
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