Top 92 Sitwell Quotes
#1. Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.
John Fowles
#2. The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls
Diana Vreeland
#3. The arts are life accelerated and concentrated.
Edith Sitwell
#4. Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
Edith Sitwell
#5. For forty days he went out into the desert - and never shot anything [on Jesus]
Osbert Sitwell
#6. The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden
Edith Sitwell
#7. Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out.
Osbert Sitwell
#8. Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
#9. What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.
Edith Sitwell
#10. But I saw the little-Ant men as they ran
Carrying the world's weight of the world's filth
And the filth in the heart of Man
Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat
than that of the Sun.
Edith Sitwell
#11. The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
Edith Sitwell
#13. I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.
Edith Sitwell
#14. A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.
Osbert Sitwell
#15. The child and the great artist
these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.
Edith Sitwell
#16. "It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees."
Edith Sitwell
#17. My education [takes place] during the holidays from Eton.
Osbert Sitwell
#18. White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.
Edith Sitwell
#19. A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell
#20. I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.
Edith Sitwell
#21. The terrible newly imported American doctrine that everyone ought to do something.
Osbert Sitwell
#22. Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell
#23. My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
Edith Sitwell
#24. Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.
Edith Sitwell
#25. People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.
Edith Sitwell
#26. The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Edith Sitwell
#27. Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.
Edith Sitwell
#28. I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.
Edith Sitwell
#29. For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,That scarlet tree within, which has the powerTo make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.
Osbert Sitwell
#30. I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
Edith Sitwell
#31. I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty ... But I am too busy thinking about myself.
Edith Sitwell
#32. One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.
Edith Sitwell
#34. Most women dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous reincarnation, or hope to be one in the next.
Edith Sitwell
#35. The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
Edith Sitwell
#36. Blood is that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us.
Osbert Sitwell
#37. The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.
Edith Sitwell
#38. The Rich Man's Banquet, which was to last for a decade, had now begun: the feast, it was recognised, went to the greediest.
Osbert Sitwell
#39. Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,
And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one
Edith Sitwell
#40. The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending
dark,
The wounds of the baited bear,
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh ... the tears of the hunted hare.
Edith Sitwell
#41. All great art contains an element of the irrational.
Edith Sitwell
#42. Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.
Edith Sitwell
#43. Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.
Edith Sitwell
#44. Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.
Edith Sitwell
#45. Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell
#47. Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.
Edith Sitwell
#48. I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
Edith Sitwell
#49. By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.
Edith Sitwell
#50. Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekinese?
Edith Sitwell
#51. By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.
Edith Sitwell
#52. I'm not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
Edith Sitwell
#53. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.
Edith Sitwell
#54. My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
Edith Sitwell
#55. Hell has a climate, but no situation. It lies in the spirit, and not in space.
Osbert Sitwell
#56. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
Edith Sitwell
#57. My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell
#58. All ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
Edith Sitwell
#59. Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
#61. The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted.
Osbert Sitwell
#62. Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity ...
Edith Sitwell
#63. Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell
#64. The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation they do not want to attract attention.
Edith Sitwell
#65. The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves ...
Edith Sitwell
#67. Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
#68. Winter is the time for comfort - it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
#69. I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell
#72. I wouldn't dream of following a fashion ... how could one be a different person every three months?
Edith Sitwell
#73. I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.
Edith Sitwell
#74. When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.
Edith Sitwell
#75. What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.
Edith Sitwell
#76. In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.
Osbert Sitwell
#78. The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.
Osbert Sitwell
#79. I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.
Edith Sitwell
#80. I have always said that if I were a rich man, I would employ a professional praiser.
Osbert Sitwell
#81. We attended stables, as we attended church, in our best clothes, thereby no doubt showing the degree of respect due to horses.
Osbert Sitwell
#83. If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Edith Sitwell
#84. How simple-minded of the Germans to imagine that we British could be cowed by the destruction of our ancient monuments! As though any havoc of the German bombs could possibly equal the things we have done ourselves!
Osbert Sitwell
#85. The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
Edith Sitwell
#86. All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ...
Edith Sitwell
#87. The living blind and seeing Dead together lie As if in love ... There was no more hating then, And no more love; Gone is the heart of Man.
Edith Sitwell
#88. It is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.
Edith Sitwell
#89. Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe ... the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.
Edith Sitwell
#90. What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.
Edith Sitwell
#91. The ghost of the heart of manred Cain
And the more murderous brain
Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death
Of his mother Earth, and tore
Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.
Edith Sitwell
#92. [History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.
Edith Sitwell
