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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the role of a professional in guiding individuals towards conventional thinking and societal norms, questioning the urgency of such a need.
Rebecca West articulates the responsibility of mental health professionals or those in similar roles to help individuals navigate their thoughts and behaviors towards societal norms. She highlights a tension between the perceived necessity of this guidance and her own ambivalence about the urgency of returning individuals to what is considered 'normal.' This suggests a deeper contemplation about the nature of normalcy and the value of diverse mental states.
Themes
Mental HealthNormalcyProfessionGuidanceSocietal Norms
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about mental health, this quote can highlight the role of therapists in navigating mental states.
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
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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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