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.
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 SitwellI 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.
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 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.
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 Sitwell