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Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes
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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
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The air is darkened with sins coming home to roost.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Happy is the day whose history is not written down.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I have an idea that conscience impedes quite as many merits as faults, is a sort of alloy, a nickel which may prevent silver from bending but also prevents it from shining.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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We managed to arrive at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura at the same moment as a funeral... a fat priest in his vestments came out of the first coach like an overgrown dahlia, and roared his way through the service with a speed only to be matched by the speed of the organist, who kept on tripping him over with the first chord of the responses, like a rugby tackle.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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There was no reliance upon Hester's kindness. It was too much like the kindness of a mother cat who will wash her kitten's face whether the kitten wishes it or no.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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We are also rather concerned about our moorhen who went mad while we were in Italy and began to build a nest in a tree.... she walks about in the tree, looking as uneasy yet persevering as a district visitor in a brothel.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I do apologize for writing by hand — and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.'
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one's works.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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My mother didn't cherish me. For my first seven years she did, though doing her duty by me impeded the cherishing. Doing one's duty by hardens the heart against. Insensibly, we repudiate our good deeds, our filthy rags of righteousness.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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He wore a glittering brass helmet much too large for him and looked, so my mother said, like a weevil in a nut.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Sneezes... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Is it the realization that people recently psychoanalyzed tend to be dreadful bores which makes the U.S.A. army reject them for the draft?
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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It is a pity but seems true, that bearing children reduces women to extremes of potential nobility or potential baseness in anything like a crisis. But robs them of the impulse to behave with reason and decency. I suppose a birth is such a shock to the nerves that one never gets over it.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Born:
December 6, 1893
Died:
May 1, 1978
(aged 84)
Bio:
Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English novelist and poet. She also made a contribution to musicology as a young woman.
Known for:
Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman (1926)
Summer will show (1936)
Mr. Fortune's maggot (1927)
The Corner That Held Them (1948)
Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)
Most used words:
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