Edith Sitwell Quotes - Page 2

It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

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.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

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.

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

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.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

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.

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.

One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

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.

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.