"Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow."
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Rebecca West quotes (page 11 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste."
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"Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal."
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"whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war."
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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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"Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life."
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"Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."
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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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"Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization."
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"It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes."
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"All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing."
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"Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas."
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"Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music."
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