Edith Sitwell Quotes & Sayings

Answers
I kept my answers small and kept them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bullwark to my fear.
The huge abstractions I kept from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.
But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacity
Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.
Even when all small answers build up to
Protection of my spirit, still I hear
Big answers striving for their overthrow.
And all the great conclusions coming near — Edith Sitwell

What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die. — Edith Sitwell

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

I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it. — Edith Sitwell

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

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

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden — 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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

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. — Edith Sitwell

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

I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish. — Edith Sitwell

All day long you sit and sew,
Stitch life down for fear it grow,
Stitch life down for fear we guess
At the hidden ugliness.
Dusty voice that throbs with heat,
Hoping with your steel-thin beat
To put stitches in my mind,
Make it tidy, make it kind,
You shall not: I'll keep it free
Though you turn earth, sky and sea
To a patchwork quilt to keep
Your mind snug and warm in sleep! — Edith Sitwell

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

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

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

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

Another little drink wouldn't do us any harm. — Edith Sitwell

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

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

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

All great art contains an element of the irrational. — Edith Sitwell

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ... — Edith Sitwell

The poet is the complete lover of mankind. — 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. — 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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

Winter is the time for comfort - it is the time for home. — Edith Sitwell

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

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

I'm not the man to balk at a low smell, I 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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented. — Edith Sitwell

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. — 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 — Edith Sitwell

Most women dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous reincarnation, or hope to be one in the next. — Edith Sitwell

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

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

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

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty ... But I am too busy thinking about myself. — Edith Sitwell

What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear. — Edith Sitwell

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life. — Edith Sitwell

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays. — 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 ... — Edith Sitwell

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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending
dark,
The wounds of the baited bear,
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh ... the tears of the hunted hare. — Edith Sitwell

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

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands. — Edith Sitwell

All ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

Poetry is the deification of reality. — Edith Sitwell

Said the lion to the lioness - "when you are amber dust -
No more a raging fire like the heat of the sun
(no liking but all lust) -
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood
and bone,
the rippling of bright muscles like
a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of
bright paws
Though we shall mate no more
Till the fire of that sun
and the moon -
Cold bone are one"

Said the skeleton lying upon the
sands of time -
"The great gold planet that
is the mourning heat
of the sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a lion that fire
consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so
is the heart.

More powerful than all dust. Once
I was hercules
Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the
seas:
But the flames of the heart
Consumed me, and
the mind
Is but a foolish wind. — Edith Sitwell

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

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance. — 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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

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

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 catfish. — Edith Sitwell

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

"It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees." — Edith Sitwell

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

The fusty showman fumbles, must
Fit in a particle of dust
The universe, for fear it gain
Its freedom from my cube of brain.
Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace
Behind my crude-striped wooden face
As I, a puppet tinsel-pink
Leap on my springs, learn how to think
Till like the trembling golden stalk
Of some long-petalled star, I walk
Through the dark heavens, and the dew
Falls on my eyes and sense thrills through. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

There is no truth. Only points of view. — Edith Sitwell

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekinese? — 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. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

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

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. — Edith Sitwell

The arts are life accelerated and concentrated. — 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. — Edith Sitwell

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