Sylvia Ashton-Warner Quotes:

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Quality, Informing

What can be heavier than wealth than freedom?

Topics: Wealth

I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

Topics: Teacher, Years, Two, Destructiveness

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Children, Two, Vision

It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.

Topics: Circumstances

Self-forgetfulness in creativity can lead to self-transcendence ...

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Creativity, Self, Transcendence, Self Forgetfulness

I never forgive attacks on my work.

Topics: Forgiving, Criticism, Never Forgive

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.

Topics: Education, Ideas, Conscious

we already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development ...

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Education, School, Development

Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.

Topics: Powerful, Inspiration, Desire

What a desire! ... to live in peace with that word: Myself.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Desire

How much of my true self I camouflage and choke in order to commend myself to him, denying the fullness of me. How often have I paraded sweetness and interest when I felt otherwise; pretended to take careful leave of him on many an occasion when I would rather have walked right out. How I've toned myself down, diluted myself to maintain his approval.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Self, Order, Camouflage

not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money ...

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Mother, Teacher, Husband, Earning Money

Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Mother, Teacher, Fall

... of the two kinds of order, the conscious and the unconscious order, only one is real. It's the order in the deep hidden places.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.87, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Real, Order, Two

To feel as well as hear what someone says requires whole attention.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Listening, Attention, Feels

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

Topics: Professors, Universe

I am inclined to think that eating is a private thing and should be done alone, like other bodily functions.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Thinking, Done, Eating, Bodily Functions, Private Things

The truth is that I am enslaved... in one vast love affair with 70 children.

Topics: Children, Affair, Truth Is

There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Creativity, Answers, Destructiveness

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

Topics: Jobs, Teaching, Cutting

You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.

Topics: Wise, Strong, Brave

When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.

Topics: Suffering, Steps, Turns, Goodbye Love

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

Topics: Children, Cat, Parenting, Concentration Camp

A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

Topics: Spring, Comforting, Acquaintance, Lager

When I teach people, I marry them.

Topics: People, Marry Me, Teach

Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.

Topics: Love, People, Demand

I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1967). “Myself”, Harvill Secker

As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.

Topics: Children, Night, Yesterday, Blackness, Nadir

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

source: - Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Teaching, Important, Way

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

Topics: Art, Heaven, Crash