Edith Sitwell Quotes

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Another little drink wouldn't do us any harm.

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

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.

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

In private life she was not in the least what her calumniators would have wished her to be. She was very quiet, had a great natural dignity, and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

There is no truth. Only points of view.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

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

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

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

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ...

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.

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?

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

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

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.

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden

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.

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.

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

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.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

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.

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

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

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

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