The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on … - Rebecca West

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[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Rebecca West

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

Fate, Idiocy, Indicative, Lives, Men, Roots

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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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There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

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In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

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It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

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Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.

Common Sense, Giving, Mamma, Mistaken, People, Sense