Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

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
He took out his pocket knife and whittled the end of the stick. Then he tried again. "What is this?" "A smaller hole." "Point," said Mr. Fortune suggestively. "Yes, I mean a smaller point." "No, not quite. It is a point... but it is not smaller. Holes may be of different sizes, but no point is larger or smaller than another point."

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I lay awake jumping like a newly-killed trout till 5 or six, when out of the dark I suddenly heard the comforting noises of the milk being set down on the door-step.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
If a given point were not in a given place it would not be there at all.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Geometry would be best to begin with plain plane geometry, immutably plane. Surely if anything could minister to the mind diseased it would be the steadfast contemplation of a right angle, an existence that no mist of human tears could blur, no blow of fate deflect.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
We read some Coventry Patmore, who is better than one thinks, but not as good as he thinks himself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
The blossom rifled,
With laden thighs
Further each willing
Eunuch plies:
A dull way to fertilize.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Yesterday... was a very queer and alarming day: classically still and brooding, and both our cats with staring coats, and slinking about at my heels in the most woe-begone way. They have a wonderful talent for being Cassandras, only unfortunately they cannot prophesy with any explicit detail, so we never know whether to expect floods, lightning, or visitors.

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

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Unfortunately we have little in common except a mutual knowledge of a story by Charlotte Yonge in which the hero is an albino curate with eyes like rubies. This is cordial, but not enough.

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

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

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
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
But no one would possibly listen to her. No one ever listened to one unless one said the wrong thing.

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

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
His expression was at once ravenous and demure; he had a profile as accurate as though it had been snipped out of a piece of paper.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Valentine's tiresome sister has lost her job. And created over this as if she had lost her hair, her teeth, her legs, her good name, and her latchkey.

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

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

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

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Proust goes on. I love him as much as ever — but between ourselves he is not a very impressive critic. Rather like Valentine's intelligent poodle with grapes. She adores grapes, and can do everything with them except bite them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
It [the bat] allowed me to pick it up and admire its fine mackintosh wings and furious fairy face. And since it was a day of ruthless sunlight I put it into a cupboard to meditate in dusk till sundown.

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

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

Sylvia Townsend Warner