Top 79 Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes
#3. To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world. No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat's yawn, "I think I will go to my grave now," and had left the room.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#8. If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#10. Sneezes ... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#12. 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
#13. Sept.17 (1780). When we call loudly thro' the speaking-trumpet to Timothy ( the tortoise), he does not seem to regard the noise. Sept.18. Timothy eats heartily. Oct.3. No ring-ouzels seen this autumn yet. Timothy very dull.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#14. How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn't even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. It was as easy for him to quit Bloomsbury for the Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard chair to a soft. Now after a little scrabbling and exploration he was curled up in the green lap and purring over the landscape.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#19. 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
#22. Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones ...
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#28. Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. Oh, I am all for singing. If I had had children I should have hounded them into choirs & choral societies, and if they weren't good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#36. Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#39. God, an enormous darkness, hung looped over half her sky, an ever-present menace, a cloud waiting to break.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#40. Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#43. 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
#48. She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again, and dressed her in the old uniform.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#49. 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
#50. I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#51. Possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#52. Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it is something to be hazardously purchased by struggle and sacrifice.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#54. Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#56. [On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#57. all her thoughts slid together again like a pack of hounds that have picked up the scent.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#58. Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#59. 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
#61. Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#62. 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
#63. Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#69. For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author ...
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#70. 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
#73. General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#78. 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
#79. 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
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