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101 " 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 "
― Rebecca West
102 " But our grief was useless. Salt water, spilled on the ground, does not feed what grows there, but kills it. "
― Rebecca West , The Saga of the Century: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund
103 " Honour often seems a highly artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness "
― Rebecca West , Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
104 " Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all. "
105 " I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance. Everything enjoyable had an equal value. In life we were not divided. Life itself was not divided. "
106 " Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable. "
107 " The moment ached, as if music were being played somewhere on an instrument whose strings had some connexion with her heart. "
― Rebecca West , The Thinking Reed
108 " You should smile at that,’ he said. ‘There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy. "
109 " But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn’t do anything to people but blame them for things they haven’t done? It will be like spending one’s whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper. "
110 " 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. "
111 " Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality. "
112 " It was the same when they sat in his office, a stupendous apartment designed in that modernist style which represents the last attempt of bad taste to escape the criticisms of good taste. "
113 " She had treated her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished. "
114 " They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had to repeat old jokes because it could no longer invent new ones, and speak of virtues in phrases so worn by use that they gave the same feeling of want as rags. "
115 " This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity "