Edith Sitwell Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.

Edith Sitwell
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

Edith Sitwell
My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

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

Edith Sitwell
I am resigned to the fact that people who don't know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writing poetry. It must be annoying to a man who wants to write to see this horrid old lady who can.

Edith Sitwell
The trouble about most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation, or hope to be one in the next.

Edith Sitwell
The child and the great artist — these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

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

Edith Sitwell
The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

Edith Sitwell
What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.

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

Edith Sitwell
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.

Edith Sitwell
A lady asked me why, on most occasions, I wore black. 'Are you in mourning?'
'Yes.'
'For whom are you in mourning?'
'For the world.'

Edith Sitwell
Cameras have arisen in our midst like a new race of mechanical ghouls.

Edith Sitwell
By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.

Edith Sitwell
The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.

Edith Sitwell
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart, and is, in Emerson's phrase, a larger imbibing of the common heart.

Edith Sitwell
Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the
Light —
The marrow in the bone
We dreamed was safe... the blood in the veins, the
sap in the tree
Were springs of Deity.

Edith Sitwell
Tall windows show Infinity;
And, hard reality,
The candles weep and pry and dance
Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within;
When once I ventured in,
Chill Silence, like a surging sea,
Slowly enveloped me.

Edith Sitwell
The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" — a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

Edith Sitwell
It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

Edith Sitwell
Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.

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