Edith Sitwell
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.Collection: Music
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.Collection: Government
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.Collection: Patience
I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.Collection: Art
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.Collection: Truth
Poetry is the deification of reality.Collection: Poetry
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.
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.
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.
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
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.
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.
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.
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.Collection: Home
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 goldfish.Collection: Women
I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.Collection: Dying
When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.Collection: Frustration
All great art contains an element of the irrational.Collection: Art
Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?Collection: Success
I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.Collection: Eels
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.Collection: Dream
There is no truth. Only points of view.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Regret
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.Collection: Happiness
... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.Collection: Skins
The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Cat
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.Collection: God
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.Collection: Sleep
Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.Collection: Beautiful
It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Brother
Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.Collection: Lying
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.Collection: Heart
[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.Collection: History
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.Collection: Reality
It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.Collection: Art
In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.Collection: Law
I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.Collection: Death
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. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.Collection: Home
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.Collection: Art
Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.Collection: Believe