Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

He looks at trees with an astonishing degree of love and trust and penetration; almost as though he were exiled from being a tree himself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
The blackthorn blossoms are coming out, all along the lane. The buds seem to be frowning on the bough as the winds bang them. They look as furious as smacked kittens, they lower. I went to feed Mrs. H.E's. hens this afternoon... The hens looked much too large for the garden; they seemed to be spreading as one looked at them, like ink-blots.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now!

Sylvia Townsend Warner
One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Nora's small purple coffin coming out of the hearse; the one bunch of brilliant spring flowers on it. Out of such bare material, out of mere birth and death, we spin the intricate web of love, we distill it from these poor bones and ashes, and with it conceive the tale that is told and ended when we die.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I discovered that dinners follow the order of creation — fish first, then entrées, then joints, lastly the apple as dessert. The soup is chaos.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
You aren't the only one to mislay. Objects have got so bold about it in this house that they mislay themselves in front of my eyes and remain in front of my eyes, mislaid. I put it down to pollution.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
She had discovered that the food you eat out of its saucepan tastes infinitely better than ever it does by the time it has been conveyed to a dining-room and withered under a conversational host.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Mrs. Moxon lit our first fire, with a gimelled prayer cum incantation of good-will upon us. It burned merrily, the room began to live, like a ship getting under way.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
After tea Bridget appeared and romped on my lap like a short stout salmon. It is not a person one feels moving when one holds a baby: it is life, compact, darting, incalculable.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
As for the slow movement, I thought it would never end. It was like being in such a slow train with so many stops that one becomes convinced that one has passed one's station.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Happiness cannot fly on one wing, I cannot be happy while you are not.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
The air is darkened with sins coming home to roost.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all the perils and choleras of acquaintance implicit in them; but in London they seem as charming as rabbits.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Blest are the poor, whose needs enable
The rich but timely charitable
To take the Kingdom of Heaven by force.
The poor are also saved, of course.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
I don't think four thousand copies such a wretched sale. You should try to take a longer view of it. If you had sold four thousand female tortoiseshell kittens, for instance, you would think you had done marvels.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Happy is the day whose history is not written down.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

Sylvia Townsend Warner