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
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that true conversation is a myth and that people engage in self-centered speech rather than genuine dialogue.
Rebecca West's quote highlights the idea that what we often perceive as conversation is merely a series of individual expressions. Instead of meaningful exchanges, we often find ourselves in situations where people are more focused on articulating their own thoughts, creating a disconnected atmosphere rather than a genuine dialogue. This observation prompts a deeper reflection on the nature of communication and the importance of listening and understanding in our interactions.
Themes
ConversationCommunicationMonologuesDialogueIllusion
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a discussion about effective communication in a workshop.
More from Rebecca West
All quotes βworks 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
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca WestRead
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Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.
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If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.
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I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.
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The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.
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