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"I write books to find out about things."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca West
"The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived."
"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple."
"The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy."
"There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience."
"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind."
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."
"International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge."
"We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy."
"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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