Smyth Quotes & Sayings

Poetry is a story
that is so good,
It doesn't need
complete sentences. — John Smyth

If you take passionate interest in a subject, it is hard not to believe yourself specially equipped for it. — Ethel Smyth

If a young dog strays up the aisle during church no one says anything, no one does anything, but, none the less, he soon becomes aware that something is wrong. Even so, as the distance between myself and the hearthrug diminished, did I become aware that something was very wrong indeed. — Ethel Smyth

Acceptance is an art that must be mastered if we want to keep our friends for the span of life that remains to us, and presently step off the stage with our self-respect intact. — Ethel Smyth

The Catholic Church wants to see child abuse by priests and nuns as simply an issue of some very bad priests and nuns. What it needs to understand is that the nature of religion compounded the problem. It allowed priests to have a status that placed them above suspicion. It fostered a myth that celibacy meant purity. It had schools that enforced authority by beating children and taught that authority figures should not be questioned. Men like Smyth and Steele will have understood the esteem in which priests were held and seen themselves as untouchable. They had every reason to, as the Catholic Church did a great deal to defend and enable them. — Noel McGivern

Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to The March of the Women from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known. — Ethel Smyth

I don't want to lose you, but I don't want to use you just to have someone by my side. — Patty Smyth

Donna E. Smyth - adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter's beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith's malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichs and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don't want to know, but need to know. Smyth's writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language. — George Elliott Clarke

Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart. — Vita Sackville-West

The only people who had authority within the Church to stop Brendan Smyth from having contact with children were his Abbot in the Monastery in Kilnacrott and his Religious Superiors in the Norbertine Order. — Sean Brady

[On golf:] ... though aware I could never be more than a humble potterer, it was impossible to repress the wild upsurgings of hope known to all middle-aged beginners ... — Ethel Smyth

The writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score. — Ethel Smyth

I can imagine nothing more tiresome than always to speak of people as if they were listening at the door. — Ethel Smyth

There's a danger in loving somebody too much, and it's sad when you know it's your heart you can't trust. — Patty Smyth

Night after night I went to sleep murmuring, 'To-morrow I will be easy, strong, quick, supple, accurate, dashing and self-controlled all at once!' For not less than this is necessary in the Game of Life called Golf. — Ethel Smyth

I loved dancing with a delirious 'I wish I could die' passion, especially when the music appealed to me ... but alas! only one in ten partners had any notion of time, and what made it worse, the nine were always behind, never before the beat ... Sometimes I would firmly seize smaller, lighter partners by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and whirl them along in the way they should go, but I saw they were not enjoying themselves, and oddly enough I wanted these wretches to like dancing with me. — Ethel Smyth

I have often noticed that when Fate has a phenomenal run of ill luck in store for you, she begins by dropping a rare piece of good fortune into your lap, thereby enhancing the artistic effect of the sequel. — Ethel Smyth

Crawling about the floor like half-dead November flies is one thing, and dancing reels another. — Ethel Smyth

If some people are right, artists are put into this world not to practice their art, but to talk about it. And judging by the flattering invitations many a humble climber will receive to pontificate from the lowest rung but one of the ladder, humanity is in a dangerously receptive frame of mind, and artists a race devoid of either modesty or sense of humor. — Ethel Smyth

Anderson!" Mr. Smyth barked from across the tent. — Katie McCoy

And like a fool who will never see the truth
I keep thinking something's gonna change
There's a danger in loving somebody too much
And it's sad when you know it's your heart they can't touch
There's a reason why people don't stay who they are
Baby sometimes love's just ain't enough — Patty Smyth

I
" She swallowed, perhaps summoning her courage, then continued, "I would not lie to you and say that I did not want this."
"Me," he cut in peevishly. "You wanted me."
She closed her eyes. "Yes," she finally said, "I wanted you."
Part of him wanted to interrupt again, to remind her that she still wanted him, that it wasn't and would never be in the past.
"But I can't have you," she said quietly, "and because of that, you can't have me."
And then, to his complete astonishment, he asked, "What if I married you? — Julia Quinn

She's life, and I'm death. Prescott Burlington-Smyth is everything I want to be. A storm moving out of a shit situation at the speed of light, not looking back to spare a glance at the casualties of her actions. How — L.J. Shen

I deeply regret that those with the authority and responsibility to deal appropriately with Brendan Smyth failed to do so, with tragic and painful consequences for those children he so cruelly abused. — Sean Brady

The charms of seclusion are seldom combined with the conveniences of civilization. — Ethel Smyth

I want you. I want you now, in every way a man can want a woman. — Julia Quinn

The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual? — Ethel Smyth

The majority of critical, and plenty of uncritical, readers find quotations a bore. — Ethel Smyth

I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea. — Ethel Smyth

When I came to know Greek art I instantly understood that excess and perfection are enemies; yet on the other hand this world and the millions of worlds around us live by fire ... ! — Ethel Smyth

I didn't know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people. — Sue Monk Kidd

When I look at sales teams, I start to see a pattern. The team members with a low quality of mind have lower figures and the ones with high quality of mind have higher figures. — Damian Mark Smyth

No one is more trustworthy than the repentant sinner who has been found out. — Ethel Smyth

With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past. — Sean Brady

No doubt other writers have often put a thing more brilliantly, more subtly than even a very cunning artist in words can hope to emulate, a supreme phrase being a bit of luck that only happens now and then. And inasmuch as the condiments and secret travail of human nature are always the same, and that certain psychological moments must ever and ever recur, what more tempting than to pin down such a moment with the blow of a borrowed hammer? — Ethel Smyth