Edith Sitwell Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Edith Sitwell
White as a winding sheet,
Masks blowing down the street:
Moscow, Paris London, Vienna — all are undone.
The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling,
Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling,
The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.

Edith Sitwell
The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

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

Edith Sitwell
One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

Edith Sitwell
The busy chatter of the heat
Shrilled like a parakeet;
And shuddering at the noonday light
The dust lay dead and white As powder on a mummy's face,
Or fawned with simian grace
Round booths with many a hard bright toy
And wooden brittle joy: The cap and bells of Time the Clown
That, jangling, whistled down
Young cherubs hidden in the guise
Of every bird that flies; And star-bright masks for youth to wear,
Lest any dream that fare
— Bright pilgrim — past our ken, should see
Hints of Reality.

Edith Sitwell
The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good — at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

Edith Sitwell
Lily O'Grady,
Silly and shady,
Longing to be
A lazy lady.

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

Edith Sitwell
I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone — as I have always walked alone.

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

Edith Sitwell
Oh you, the hour when the work of the world, the hunt for our food, is done —
Love me, my ultimate Darkness, kiss me, my infinite Sun!

Edith Sitwell
I feel as if all my blood had been sucked, and my brains eaten by clothes moths. What I would give to be able to work uninterrupted!

Edith Sitwell
Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'.

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
We once had a lily here that bore 108 flowers on one stalk: it was photographed naturally for all the gardening papers. The bees came from miles and miles, and there were the most disgraceful Bacchanalian scenes: bees hardly able to find their way home.

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
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, — dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain —
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

Edith Sitwell
I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell,
I'm not the man to insist on asphodel.
This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think?
It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

Edith Sitwell
By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

Edith Sitwell
If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Edith Sitwell
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

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
Still falls the Rain —
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, — those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark...

Edith Sitwell
In the Augustan age... poetry was... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

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

Edith Sitwell
It is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.

Edith Sitwell