A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Rebecca WestRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that someone's disagreeable behavior is a result of long-term practice rather than a sudden change.
Rebecca West's quote highlights how certain negative behaviors, such as rudeness or disagreeableness, can become ingrained through consistent practice over time. It implies that individuals may not just exhibit these traits arbitrarily; instead, they can be the result of deliberate cultivation, similar to mastering a skill, which can shed light on the reasons behind their behavior today.
Themes
RudenessBehaviorPracticeDisagreeableRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about how negative behavior can become habitual.
More from Rebecca West
All quotes →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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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
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All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
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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.
Rebecca WestRead
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca WestRead
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