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 SitwellBy '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 SitwellWhat 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 SitwellThe 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 SitwellThe child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.
Edith SitwellVirginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith SitwellSaid 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 SitwellWinter 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 SitwellI 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 SitwellWhat 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 SitwellBy the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.
Edith SitwellPicasso 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 SitwellThe 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 SitwellIf certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Edith SitwellThe 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 SitwellIn 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 SitwellWinter 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.
Edith SitwellThe 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 SitwellPoetry 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 SitwellMy 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 SitwellArt is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.
Edith SitwellWhen we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.
Edith SitwellWhy not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
Edith SitwellIt is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.
Edith Sitwellit is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.
Edith SitwellRhythm 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.
Edith SitwellAs 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.
Edith SitwellIsn'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 SitwellVulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell