Best 70 quotes of Edith Sitwell on MyQuotes

Edith Sitwell

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    Edith Sitwell

    All great art contains an element of the irrational.

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    Edith Sitwell

    A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

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    Edith Sitwell

    All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

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    Edith Sitwell

    ... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Another little drink wouldn't do us any harm.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.

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    Edith Sitwell

    As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

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    Edith Sitwell

    As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

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    Edith Sitwell

    But I saw the little-Ant men as they ran Carrying the world's weight of the world's filth And the filth in the heart of Man-- Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat than that of the Sun.

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    Edith Sitwell

    By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.

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    Edith Sitwell

    By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

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    Edith Sitwell

    [History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

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    Edith Sitwell

    If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

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    Edith Sitwell

    If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

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    Edith Sitwell

    I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

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    Edith Sitwell

    In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

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    Edith Sitwell

    it is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.

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    Edith Sitwell

    It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

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    Edith Sitwell

    I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?

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    Edith Sitwell

    My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

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    Edith Sitwell

    My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.

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    Edith Sitwell

    One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.

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    Edith Sitwell

    People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone, And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood, Remember only this of our hopeless love That never till Time is done Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one

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    Edith Sitwell

    Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

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    Edith Sitwell

    Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The busy chatter of the heat Shrilled like a parakeet; And shuddering at the noonday light The dust lay dead and white As powder on a mummy's face, Or fawned with simian grace Round booths with many a hard bright toy And wooden brittle joy: The cap and bells of Time the Clown That, jangling, whistled down Young cherubs hidden in the guise Of every bird that flies; And star-bright masks for youth to wear, Lest any dream that fare Bright pilgrim past our ken, should see Hints of Reality.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The ghost of the heart of manred Cain And the more murderous brain Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death Of his mother Earth, and tore Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

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    Edith Sitwell

    The light would show (if it could harden) Eternities of kitchen garden

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    Edith Sitwell

    The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.