Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

To think of losing is to lose already.

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.

The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.

When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.

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.

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

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.

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.

Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.

Happy is the day whose history is not written down.

Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.

noise is a pollution.

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.

Happiness is an immunity.

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.

And another day is tucked under my wing.

Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.

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!

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.

There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.

Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.

There are not enough poems in praise of bed.