When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Categorized in : Moving Mind Circles

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

possession earth tree

The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

gravity flaws fall

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

truth

To think of losing is to lose already.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

loses losing thinking

One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

hate hatred stupid

once, when I was a young lady and on a night express ... I was awakened by a man coming in from the corridor and taking hold of my leg ... Quite as much to my own astonishment as his, I uttered the most appalling growl that ever came out of a tigress. He fled, poor man, without a word: and I lay there, trembling slightly, not at my escape but at my potentialities.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

confidence men night

The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and arrive very late; or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs Leak would not mind. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!

Sylvia Townsend Warner

sleep sweet love

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

selfish music writing

I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

quality unhappy kindness

There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at once ... It is the time when one has freshly learned to read. The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

independent reading two

And another day is tucked under my wing.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

another-day wings night

Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

fighting change rights

Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

one-day may people

There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

pursued courses moral

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

leisure waste sin

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

dear-ones real love-is

One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

bread-of-life helpful running

[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

artist giving men

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

pirate choices people

London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

sunflower apples tea