Top Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

Sylvia Townsend Warner Biography

Sylvia Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist and poet. She also made a contribution to musicology as a young woman.

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Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

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.

Flash, Gone, Long, Old

But what are wishes, compared with longings?

Compared, Desire, Longing, Longings, Wish, Wishes

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

Age, Children, Force, Loses, Mercy, Parent

Elizabeth. . . had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones.

Generous, Large, Prerogative, Rich

when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

German, Mania, Propaganda, Trying, War, World

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.

Apples, Exciting, Glossy, Sunflower, Tea, Thick

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

Hearers, Louder, Peculiarity, Sneezes, Sound

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.

Beauty, Necessity, Power, Truth

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

Everything, Fall, Fatal, Flaws, Gravity

Love amazes, but it does not surprise.

Amazes, Doe, Love, Surprise

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.

Independent, Jellyfish, Reading, Thing, Till, Two Worlds

Belligerents always abolish war after a war.

Abolish, Belligerents, War

Children driven good are apt to be driven mad.

Children, Driven, Good, Mad

I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.

Grandmother, Grandparent, Old, Wanton, Wish, Youth

She was heavier than he expected - women always are.

Expected, Heavier, Women

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.

Educated, Lucky

In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one's works.

Cared, Easy, Henceforth, Loves, Morning, People

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.

Grief, Leaves, Love Is, Resentment, Should Have, Women

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.

Heavenly, Music, Purest, Selfish, Wagner, Writing

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.

Affably, Glaciers, Grandmother, Monuments, People, Tombstone

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Sylvia Townsend Warner Biography

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