Sylvia Townsend Warner
To think of losing is to lose already.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Tree
The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.Collection: Fall
Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.Collection: Truth
When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Cat
There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at once ... It is the time when one has freshly learned to read. The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before.Collection: Reading
Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Hate
Happy is the day whose history is not written down.Collection: Written
Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.Collection: Expectations
noise is a pollution.Collection: Noise
once, when I was a young lady and on a night express ... I was awakened by a man coming in from the corridor and taking hold of my leg ... Quite as much to my own astonishment as his, I uttered the most appalling growl that ever came out of a tigress. He fled, poor man, without a word: and I lay there, trembling slightly, not at my escape but at my potentialities.Collection: Confidence
Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.Collection: Change
Happiness is an immunity.Collection: Happiness
Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.Collection: Leisure
And another day is tucked under my wing.Collection: Night
Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.Collection: Real
The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and arrive very late; or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs Leak would not mind. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!Collection: Love
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.Collection: Music
There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.Collection: Moral
I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.Collection: Lucky
Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.Collection: Real
There are not enough poems in praise of bed.Collection: Bed
Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.Collection: People
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.Collection: Running
Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.Collection: Spring
about ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut, my letters are unwritten, the house is a shambles, and I sit here as happy as Mrs. Jellaby, though I am in 1836, not Africa. It won't go on like this, I shall fall over some obstacle, and wake out of my dreams with a black eye and broken shins: but while it does last, I daren't interrupt it. I haven't had such a spell of writing for nearly three years.Collection: Dream
[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.Collection: Aunt
... the advantages of being a postman seemed more and more dubious. It is not a congenial profession for anyone who is at all sensitive, for people visit upon the postman all their first annoyance at receiving a couple of bills when they looked for a love-letter, and if a packet is insufficiently stamped they hand over the pennies as though to a despicable bandit, too outrageous to be denied, too groveling to be feared.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Mad
... 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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Children
Love amazes, but it does not surprise.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Cat
My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.Collection: Tombstone
General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.Collection: Usual
There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else.Collection: Littles
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.Collection: Grandmother
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.Collection: Writing
cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.Collection: Cooking
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.Collection: Ideas
All encounters with children are touched with social embarrassment.Collection: Children
Reason is a poor hand at prophecies.Collection: Hands
Children driven good are apt to be driven mad.Collection: Children
Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.Collection: Youth
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.Collection: Horse