78+ Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes On Friendship, Death And Feminist

Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English novelist and poet. She was a prolific writer who wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and literary criticism. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and is best known for her novel Lolly Willowes, which was published in 1926. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner on love, friendship, life.

Top 10 Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes

1. ... possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.
2. The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.
3. Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.
4. 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.
5. Inflation is the senility of democracies.
6. There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.
7. Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.
8. And another day is tucked under my wing.
9. Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.
10. [On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Short Quotes

• For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.
• There are not enough poems in praise of bed.
• When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.
• Happy is the day whose history is not written down.
• Reason is a poor hand at prophecies.
• noise is a pollution.
• But what are wishes, compared with longings?
• Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.
• Children driven good are apt to be driven mad.
• [John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes About Love

Love amazes, but it does not surprise. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes About Life

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner Famous Quotes And Sayings

Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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! — Sylvia Townsend Warner

The baby romped on my lap like a short stout salmon. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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? — Sylvia Townsend Warner

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

... 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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Belligerents always abolish war after a war. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Oh, I am all for singing. If I had had children I should have hounded them into choirs & choral societies, and if they weren't good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Happiness is an immunity. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

To think of losing is to lose already. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

... 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

One cannot revoke a true happiness. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

She was heavier than he expected - women always are. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

All encounters with children are touched with social embarrassment. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Life Lessons by Sylvia Townsend Warner

1. Sylvia Townsend Warner's work emphasizes the importance of exploring the complexities of human relationships, and the need to be open to different perspectives.
2. Her writing also highlights the power of imagination and the importance of creating a safe and supportive environment in which to explore new ideas.
3. Finally, her work celebrates the beauty of nature and the importance of appreciating the natural world.