Rebecca West Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Rebecca West. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
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Rebecca West
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I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
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Rebecca West (The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917)
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
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Rebecca West (The Fountain Overflows)
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The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
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Rebecca West
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[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
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Rebecca West (The Harsh Voice)
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Then Raya saw Rebecca West, the fourteen-year-old who only saved her own life by testifying against her mother, and then she saw her own face reflected in these girls – a swirl of chance, and life and sorrow.
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Sara Pascoe (Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask for)
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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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Rebecca West
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People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
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Rebecca West
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It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
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Rebecca West
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Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone β€” or inconsequential. Ignorance is voluntary and confusion is temporary. You see the world as-is, which is more than can be said for the vast populace.
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Rebecca McKinsey (Sydney West (Sydney West #1))
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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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Rebecca West (The Book Of Military Quotations)
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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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Rebecca West
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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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Rebecca West
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Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
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Rebecca Solnit (Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West)
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For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
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Rebecca West
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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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Rebecca West
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I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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There seem to be two main types of people in the world, crosswords and sudokus.
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Rebecca McKinsey (Sydney West (Sydney West #1))
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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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Rebecca West (Birds Fall Down)
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It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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Rebecca West
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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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Rebecca West (This Real Night)
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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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Rebecca West (The Birds Fall Down)
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Yes,” said Mamma, β€œthis is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
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Rebecca West (The Fountain Overflows)
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Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that sometimes one needs help with moving the piano.
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Rebecca West
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At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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If I am weak for wanting you, then let me embrace that weakness and make it my strength," he said, his gaze fixed on the west. "And if you must haunt me, then let me haunt you in return.
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Rebecca Ross (A Fire Endless (Elements of Cadence, #2))
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...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.
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Rebecca West
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What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
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Rebecca Solnit (River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West)
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Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.
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Rebecca McKinsey (Sydney West (Sydney West #1))
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she repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music
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Rebecca West (Cousin Rosamund)
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the world had gone too far in its enthusiasm for moderation and the thing had to be stopped
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Rebecca West (This Real Night)
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She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air.
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Rebecca West (This Real Night)
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It feels strange,” she whispered. β€œTo not know which side I belong to.” β€œYou belong to both,” he replied. β€œYou are the east as you are the west. You are mine as I am yours.
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Rebecca Ross (A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1))
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I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
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Rebecca West (Harriet Hume)
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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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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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But he would come if she needed him. All she had to do was stand in her garden and speak his name into the wind, and he would come when the whisper on the breeze found him. When he recognized her voice within it, whether the wind blew from the north, the south, the east, or the west. Sometimes it took hours for him to arrive, but he always faithfully answered.
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Rebecca Ross (A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1))
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There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then had published a limerick.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.
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Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
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Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
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Rebecca West
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She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.
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Rebecca West (The Fountain Overflows)
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I want to make the feminine scar. Helen of Troy was, after all, unfecundable. She was one of the rigid ones, like [Virginia] Woolf and [Rebecca] West.
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AnaΓ―s Nin (A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953)
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My work expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don’t believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
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Rebecca West
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As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides, lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens shone mauve; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath of a plague and have escaped it.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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I realized that if I had said to them, "You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket," they would have nodded and said, "Yes," and if I had gone on and said, "But you yourselves have only second-class tickets," they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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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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Rebecca West (Harriet Hume)
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Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever
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Rebecca West (Harriet Hume)
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The mare and I took to the fields, chasing after the sun in the west, following the promise of blue wildflowers.
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Rebecca Ross (The Queen's Rising (The Queen’s Rising, #1))
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Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.
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Sigrid Nunez (The Friend)
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You and I have faced many things alone. Between the mainland and the isle, the east and the west, we've carried our troubles in solitude. As if it were weakness to share one's burden with another. But I am with you now. I am yours, and I want you to lay your burdens down on me.
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Rebecca Ross (A Fire Endless (Elements of Cadence, #2))
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Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
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Virginia Woolf
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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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My point is this β€” you don't know. When I was first here, people looked at my hair, noticed apples on my tray, and thought 'hippie.' Then, from 'hippie' they thought 'druggie.' From there it went to 'will get me in trouble' and 'not worth my time,' and then they stopped thinking at all. No one bothered to find out if what they thought about me was true. No one wanted to hear what I thought. No one cared what I believed in. No one cared about talking to me or asking what my plans were for the day or night. And then came you. Don't let what you think you know make him into what I could have been. Don't become someone who doesn't think, just because you don't like him for some reason. Because, quite frankly, I like how you think. Except for now, of course.
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Rebecca McKinsey (Sydney West (Sydney West #1))
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Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
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Rebecca West (The Thinking Reed)
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I will beΒ­lieve that the batΒ­tle of femΒ­iΒ­nism is over, and that the feΒ­male has reached a poΒ­siΒ­tion of equalΒ­ity with the male, when I hear that a counΒ­try has alΒ­lowed itΒ­self to be turned upΒ­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pasΒ­sion for a toΒ­tally bald woman writer.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.
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Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy)
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Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.
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Rebecca West (The Fountain Overflows)
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A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one’s table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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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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Rebecca West (Harriet Hume)
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It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.
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Rebecca West
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A city that had learned to make good bread had learned to make good cake also. A city that built itself up by good sense and industry had formed a powerful secondary intention of elegance.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven.
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Rebecca West (This Real Night)
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Now King Alexander is driving down the familiar streets, curiously unguarded, in a curiously antique car. It can be seen from his attempt to make his stiff hand supple, from a careless flash of his careful black eyes, it can be seen that he is taking the cheers of the crowd with a childish seriousness. It is touching, like a girl putting full faith in the compliments that are paid to her at a ball.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Gentlemen?” Dr Nari Zhang appeared at the door. Angus jumped. β€œJesus.” He looked down at the thick socks on her feet, which were intriguingly dainty. The new doc was way too appealing for him to be this irritated with her. Which only pissed him off more. β€œNew rule. You keep the loud shoes on all day. No changing into socks.” She rolled her eyes. β€œI had hoped to talk to all three of you about the shooting yesterday. It had to have brought up difficult memories. How did everyone sleep?” β€œFantastic,” West said smoothly. β€œNever better,” Wolfe agreed. β€œLike a baby,” Angus said. Nari sighed. β€œYou’re all morons. You can take that as my professional opinion.
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Rebecca Zanetti (Hidden (Deep Ops, #1))
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All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.
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Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.
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Rebecca Solnit
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The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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Goodness is adorable, and it is immortal. When it is trodden down into the earth it springs up again, and human beings scrabble in the dust to find the first green seedling of its return. The stock cannot survive save by the mutual kindness of men and women, of old and young, of state and individual. Hatred comes before love, and gives the hater strange and delicious pleasures, but its works are short-lived; the head is cut from the body before the time of natural death, the lie is told to frustrate the other rogue’s plan before it comes to fruit. Sooner or later society tires of making a mosaic of these evil fragments; and even if the rule of hatred lasts some centuries it occupies no place in real time, it is a hiatus in reality, and not the vastest material thefts, not world wide raids on mines and granaries, can give it substance.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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The word β€œidiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
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Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)
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Her question made me remember that the word β€˜idiot’ comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence
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Rebecca West
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That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty
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Rebecca West
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I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.
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Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)
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He probably wanted real power, the power to direct one's environment towards a harmonious end, and not fictitious power, the power to order and be obeyed; and he must have known that he had not been able to exercise real power over Rome. It would have been easier for him if what we were told when we were young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to immorality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult. All we know of Roman immorality teaches us that absolute power is a poison, and that the Romans, being fundamentally an inartistic people, had a taste for pornography which they often gratified in the description of individuals and families on which that poison had worked.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldviewβ€”but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out...
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Rebecca Solnit (River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West)
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Sydney tried β€” sometimes he really tried β€” but his default mindset didn’t have those kinds of manners. What he really meant was more like β€œJacob, get over here or I’ll freeze your underwear.” Something like that.
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Rebecca McKinsey (Lorem Ipsum (Sydney West #2))
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I find that this always happens when I try to interrupt Slavs who are quarreling. They draw all the energy out of the air by the passion of their debate, so that anything outside its orbit can only flutter trivially.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Here was the authentic voice of the Slav. These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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He is in his late sixties, but has the charm of extreme youth, for he comes to a pleasure and hails it happily for what it is without any bitterness accumulated from past disappointments, and he believes that any moment the whole process of life may make a slight switch-over and that everything will be agreeable for ever. His manners would satisfy the standards of any capital in the world, but at the same time he is exquisitely, pungently local.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
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Rebecca West
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That taught me a lesson I've always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.
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Rebecca West
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He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. He would never love me because of Rebecca. She was in the house still, as Mrs Danvers had said; she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning-room, in the gallery above the hall.
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Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
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He would never love me because of Rebecca. She was in the house still, as Mrs Danvers had said; she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning-room, in the gallery above the hall. Even in the little flower-room, where her mackintosh still hung. And in the garden, and in the woods, and down in the stone cottage on the beach. Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent lingered on the stairs. The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she liked. Her favourite flowers filled the rooms. Her clothes were in the wardrobes in her room, her
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Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
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The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.
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Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
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….unable to find a title for her last published novel, she wrote six lines which included her eventual title The Birds Fall Down. These lines were attributed to Conway Power (the name she generally appended to her poetry, even in her private notebooks), from a non-existent poem called β€˜Guide to a Disturbed Planet.’ When the novel was published she had fun deflecting the enquiries of readers who wanted to know how to find the works of Conway Power. One was told a long story: Conway Power was a landowner in a remote area who had written thousands of poems and destroyed most of them. He had left some of them with her, given his property to a nephew, and gone abroad. β€˜If I can trace the book (if there is a book) I’ll let you know.
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Victoria Glendinning (Rebecca West : A Life)
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I made a vow to you,” he said, caressing her hair. β€œIf you ask me to remain in the east while you are in the west… it will feel as if half of me has been torn away.” A sound escaped her; Jack could feel how she trembled. β€œI worry that if you come with me,” she said after a tense moment, β€œYou will soon resent me. You will long for your family, and you will ache for your music. I’m unable to give you everything you need, Jack.” Her words struck him like a sword. Slowly, his hands fell away from her. Old feelings flared in him, the feelings he had carried as a boy, when he had felt unclaimed and unwanted. β€œYou want me to stay here then?” he said in a flat tone. β€œYou don’t want me to come with you?” β€œI want you with me,” Adaira said. β€œBut not if it’s going to destroy you.
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Rebecca Ross (A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1))
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Thanksgiving My guy buys brie, a baguette, and cherry tomatoes with his food stamps. I buy firewood and wine. We go up the canyon and light a fire in a stone fire pit and sit in soft folding chairs and talk for hours, let the penny-colored pit bull walk against the river current. And as we sit, the tall granite walls of the canyon slowly purple to black, and the sky goes out, and the flames we're sitting by get brighter and warmer, until we begin to dwindle, and we douse them, and we go.
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Rebecca Lindenberg (The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series))
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What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. The artist says, 'I will make that event happen again, altering its shape, which was disfigured by its contacts with other events, so that its true significance is revealed'; and his audience says, 'We will let that event happen again by looking at this man's picture or house, listening to his music or reading his book.' It must not be copied, it must be remembered, it must be lived again, passed through those parts of the mind which are actively engaged in life, which bleed when they are wounded and give forth the bland emulsions of joy, while at the same time it is being examined by those parts of the mind which stand apart from life. At the end of this process the roots of experience are traced; the alchemy by which they make a flower of joy or pain is, so far as is possible to our brutishness, detected. What is understood is mastered. If art could investigate all experiences then man would understand the whole of life, and could control his destiny.
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Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
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Whether he talked or not made little difference to my mood. My only enemy was the clock on the dashboard, whose hands would move relentlessly to one o'clock. We drove east, we drove west, amidst the myriad villages that cling like limpets to the Mediterranean shore, and today I remember none of them. All I remember is the feel of the leather seats, the texture of the map upon my knee, its frayed edges, its worn seams, and how one day, looking at the clock, I thought to myself, 'This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost, ' and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting. When I opened my eyes we were by a bend in the road, and a peasant girl in a black shawl waved to us; I can see her now, her dusty skirt, her gleaming, friendly smile, and in a second we had passed the bend and could see her no more. Already she belonged to the past, she was only a memory. I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone, and then it came to me that if we did it would not be the same, even the sun would be changed in the sky, casting another shadow, and the peasant girl would trudge past us along the road in a different way, not waving this time, perhaps not even seeing us. There was something chilling in the thought, something a little melancholy, and looking at the clock I saw that five more minutes had gone by. Soon we would have reached our time limit, and must return to the hotel. 'If only there could be an invention', I said impulsively, 'that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again." (Rebecca, chapter five)
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Daphne du Maurier
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By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Tsar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and musing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.
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Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)