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Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes - Page 4

All Quotes Age Children Conscience Pleasure Writing
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.

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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Ideas, Shining, Bending
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Susanna Pinney (1998). “I'll stand by you: selected letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland : with narrative by Sylvia Townsend Warner”, Random House (UK)

cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Cooking, Pleasure, Succulents
Sylvia Townsend Warner (2011). “Scenes of Childhood”, p.37, Faber & Faber

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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Writing, Blood, Hands
Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

... 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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Couple, Hands, People

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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Mad, Tree, Nests
Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

... 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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Two, Silence, Three
Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tombstone, Grandmother, People
Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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