Edith Sitwell Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

Edith Sitwell
Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Edith Sitwell
Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for talk beside the fire; it is the time for home.

Edith Sitwell
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

Edith Sitwell
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself.

Edith Sitwell
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Edith Sitwell
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Edith Sitwell
There are people, also, who cannot believe that beauty and gaiety are a part of goodness.
When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Edith Sitwell
In later years the great novelist who was known as George Eliot had, in spite of her ugliness, a monolithic, mysterious, primeval grandeur of countenance, like that of an Easter Island statue, washed by oceans of light.

Edith Sitwell
Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

Edith Sitwell
Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints

Edith Sitwell
Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad — we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress — at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned.

Edith Sitwell
The past and present
Are as one –
Accordant and discordant
Youth and age
And death and birth –
For out of one came all
From all comes one.

Edith Sitwell
I am as unpopular as an electric eel in a pool of flatfish.

Edith Sitwell
What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.

Edith Sitwell
All ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

Edith Sitwell
The living blind and seeing Dead together lie
As if in love... There was no more hating then,
And no more love; Gone is the heart of Man.

Edith Sitwell
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us —

Edith Sitwell
I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

Edith Sitwell
I do not want Miss Mannin's feelings to be hurt by the fact that I have never heard of her... At the moment I am debarred from the pleasure of putting her in her place by the fact that she has not got one.

Edith Sitwell
Oh how the Vacancy
Laughed at them rushing by.
"Turn again, flesh and brain,
Only yourselves again!
How far above the ape
Differing in each shape,
You with your regular
Meaningless circles are!"

Edith Sitwell
People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.

Edith Sitwell
I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?

Edith Sitwell
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

Edith Sitwell
Mother or Murderer, you have
given or taken life —
Now all is one!

Edith Sitwell