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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no truth. Only points of view.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

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

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

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

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 great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints Of tentative and half-soiled tints

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.

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.

The trouble about most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation, or hope to be one in the next.

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

The living blind and seeing Dead together lie As if in love . . . There was no more hating then, And no more love; Gone is the heart of Man.

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.