Sylvia Townsend Warner Short Quotes

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Happy is the day whose history is not written down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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