Edith Sitwell Quotes

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.

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

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

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

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

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

The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

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.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

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.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

There is no truth. Only points of view.

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

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna - all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.

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

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

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