Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes - Page 2

... possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.

There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.

How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week.

She was heavier than he expected - women always are.

I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.

no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.

I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all the perils and choleras of acquaintance implicit in them; but in London they seem as charming as rabbits.

I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.

[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.

One cannot revoke a true happiness.

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.

Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it is something to be hazardously purchased by struggle and sacrifice.

But what are wishes, compared with longings?

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.

Is it the realization that people recently psychoanalyzed tend to be dreadful bores which makes the U.S.A. army reject them for the draft?

The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now!

To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world. No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.

For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.

Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

Sneezes ... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.