Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
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
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
Sneezes... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
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
Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Death transfigured her. In a matter of minutes I saw the beauty of her young days reassert itself on her blurred careworn face. It was like something in music, the re-establishment of the original key, the return of the theme. Don't think I am unhappy and alone, dear William. I am not. I am in a new country and she is the compass I travel by.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Violet walked first with Valentine, then with me, pouring out her anxious heart, clinging, like a heavy butterfly, to my arm.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Slowly, with a look of intense concentration, he got up and advanced on me... put out a front paw, and stroked my cheek as I used to stoke his chops. A human caress from a cat. I felt very meagre and ill-educated that I could not purr.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace.

Sylvia Townsend Warner