Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“To think of losing is to lose already.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“We are also rather concerned about our moorhen who went mad while we were in Italy and began to build a nest in a tree. ... she walks about in the tree, looking as uneasy yet persevering as a district visitor in a brothel.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“There are not enough poems in praise of bed ...”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now!”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Happy is the day whose history is not written down.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Is it the realization that people recently psychoanalyzed tend to be dreadful bores which makes the U.S.A. army reject them for the draft?”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“... the advantages of being a postman seemed more and more dubious. It is not a congenial profession for anyone who is at all sensitive, for people visit upon the postman all their first annoyance at receiving a couple of bills when they looked for a love-letter, and if a packet is insufficiently stamped they hand over the pennies as though to a despicable bandit, too outrageous to be denied, too groveling to be feared.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one's works.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“She was heavier than he expected - women always are.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Slowly, with a look of intense concentration, he got up and advanced on me ... put out a front paw, and stroked my cheek as I used to stoke his chops. A human caress from a cat. I felt very meagre and ill-educated that I could not purr.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.”
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner
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