"Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul."
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Quote collection
Rebecca West quotes (page 2 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond."
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"Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats."
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"Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death."
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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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"Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause."
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"There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep."
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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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"Art is not a luxury, but a necessity."
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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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"Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy."
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"He is every other inch a gentleman."
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"We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy."
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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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"In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility."
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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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"Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed."
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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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"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."
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