"International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge."
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Quote collection
Rebecca West quotes (page 4 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample."
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"Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself."
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"the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience."
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"There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time."
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"Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen."
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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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"Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts."
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"I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value."
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"She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life."
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"Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word."
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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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"a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever."
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"I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood."
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"works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously."
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"What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience."
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"No great thing happens suddenly."
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"Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school."
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"A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps."
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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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