Sylvia Townsend Warner famous quotes

To think of losing is to lose already.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Thinking #Losing

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

#Tree #Earth #Possession

The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Fall #Flaws #Gravity

Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Spring #Autumn #Self

[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Men #Artist #Giving

General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Faces #Usual #Appearance

[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Aunt #Wish #Anarchist

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

#Mad #Tree #Nests

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

#Long #Gone #Flash

There are not enough poems in praise of bed ...
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Bed #Praise #Enough

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

#Horse #Home #Soul

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

#Memories #Cat #Eye

Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Youth #Young #Caution

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

#Change #Fighting #Rights

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

#Two #Silence #Three

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

#Army #People #Realization

... 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

#Couple #Hands #People

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

#Morning #People #Easy

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

#Moving #Circles #Mind

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

#Grief #Love Is #Littles

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Expected

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Love #Grief #Knowing

Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#People #One Day #May

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

#Cat #Looks #Paws

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

#Leadership #Fall #Naked

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Wealth #Flash #Wealthy

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

#Apples #Tea #Sunflower

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

#Running #Bread #Helpful

How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Tree #Stones #Pruning

Inflation is the senility of democracies.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Democracy #Economics #Inflation

There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Moral

Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Smell #Kitchen #Together

The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and arrive very late; or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs Leak would not mind. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Love #Sweet #Sleep

I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Cat #Eye #Nursing

The baby romped on my lap like a short stout salmon.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Baby #Children #Lap

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Eye #Self #Going Away

about ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut, my letters are unwritten, the house is a shambles, and I sit here as happy as Mrs. Jellaby, though I am in 1836, not Africa. It won't go on like this, I shall fall over some obstacle, and wake out of my dreams with a black eye and broken shins: but while it does last, I daren't interrupt it. I haven't had such a spell of writing for nearly three years.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Dream #Book #Fall

for the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author ...
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Character #Lasts #Six

when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#War #Trying #World

Belligerents always abolish war after a war.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#War

Oh, I am all for singing. If I had had children I should have hounded them into choirs & choral societies, and if they weren't good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Children #Singing #Good Enough

Sneezes ... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Sound

The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Religious #Fun #Loss

To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world. No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Fall #Desire #World

Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it is something to be hazardously purchased by struggle and sacrifice.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Struggle #Sacrifice #Fields

Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones ...
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Rich #Generous

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Real #Love Is #Boring

... possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Accepting #Strikes #Possessiveness

Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Cat #Eye #Dark

Love amazes, but it does not surprise.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Doe #Surprise

Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Real #Two

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Children #Parent #Age

When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Thinking #People #Annoyed

Reason is a poor hand at prophecies.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Hands #Reason #Poor

There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at once ... It is the time when one has freshly learned to read. The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Reading #Independent #Two

I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all the perils and choleras of acquaintance implicit in them; but in London they seem as charming as rabbits.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Country #People #May

Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Knives #Gossip #Castles

Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Expectations #Anticipation #Pleasure

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Lucky #Educated

no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Disappointment #Want #Possibility

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Writing #Diaries #Needs

But what are wishes, compared with longings?
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Desire #Wish #Longing

cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Cooking #Pleasure #Succulents

I have an idea that conscience impedes quite as many merits as faults, is a sort of alloy, a nickel which may prevent silver from bending but also prevents it from shining.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Ideas #Shining #May

once, when I was a young lady and on a night express ... I was awakened by a man coming in from the corridor and taking hold of my leg ... Quite as much to my own astonishment as his, I uttered the most appalling growl that ever came out of a tigress. He fled, poor man, without a word: and I lay there, trembling slightly, not at my escape but at my potentialities.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Confidence #Night #Men

All encounters with children are touched with social embarrassment.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Children #Encounters #Social

I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Writing #Hands #Two

I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Grandmother #Grandparent #Wish

noise is a pollution.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Noise #Pollution

And another day is tucked under my wing.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Night #Wings #Another Day

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Music #Selfish #Writing

I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Kindness #Quality #Unhappy

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Waste #Leisure #Sin

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#People #Pirate #Choices

One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Stupid #Hate #Hatred

Happiness is an immunity.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Happiness

One cannot revoke a true happiness.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Happiness #True Happiness

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Tombstone #Grandmother #Grandparent

Children driven good are apt to be driven mad.
-- Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Children #Mad #Driven