Edith Sitwell Quotes

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

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.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

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.

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

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?

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

There is no truth. Only points of view.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.

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.

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.

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.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

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.

I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

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.

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.

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.