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
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Banning books is morally wrong and should be vehemently opposed.
In this quote, Rebecca West emphasizes the fundamental importance of freedom of expression and access to literature. She equates the act of banning books with an extreme moral injustice, suggesting that such practices stifle knowledge, creativity, and the fundamental rights of individuals to engage with ideas and narratives.
Themes
BooksCensorshipFreedomExpressionKnowledgeMorality
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the importance of literary freedom.
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.
Rebecca WestRead
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca WestRead
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.
Rebecca WestRead
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
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.
Rebecca WestRead
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And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.
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I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language
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Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.
Stephen FryRead
You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
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