Rebecca Quotes

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

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.

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

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.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.

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.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

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.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!

it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.