"If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes."
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Quote collection
Rebecca West quotes (page 7 of 11)
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust."
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"Where there is real love one wants to go to church first."
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"His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth."
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"Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family."
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"A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity."
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"... to lovers innumerable things do not matter."
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"Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to."
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"Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation."
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"If there is to be any romance in marriage woman must be given every chance to earn a decent living at other occupations. Otherwise no man can be sure that he is loved for himself alone, and that his wife did not come to the Registry Office because she had no luck at the Labour Exchange."
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"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped."
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"Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned."
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"Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?"
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"every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris."
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"Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn."
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"A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change."
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"My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. ... I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so."
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"It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth."
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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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"Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit."
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