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

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

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

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

Edith Sitwell
She wore an extraordinary amount of clothes in some places and — it being the evening — none in others.

Edith Sitwell
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

Edith Sitwell
I am not an eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.

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

Edith Sitwell
I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed — it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Edith Sitwell
Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

Edith Sitwell
I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

Edith Sitwell
A pompous woman of his acquaintance, complaining that the head-waiter of a restaurant had not shown her and her husband immediately to a table, said, 'We had to tell him who we were.' Gerald, interested, enquired, 'And who were you?'

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
The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden

Edith Sitwell
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

Edith Sitwell
Within your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair;
The songs that turned to gold the evening air
When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.

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 wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

Edith Sitwell
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

Edith Sitwell
The flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.

Edith Sitwell
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Edith Sitwell
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again.

Edith Sitwell
The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps... so is the heart
More powerful than all dust.

Edith Sitwell
In the great gardens, after bright spring rain,
We find sweet innocence come once again.

Edith Sitwell
A man reporter asked me on the telephone: 'Is it true you are 78?' I replied: 'No. Eighty-two.' 'But I read last week that you are 78.' 'Yes, but that was last week. This week I'm 82.'

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
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