Edith Sitwell
31 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."
"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself."
"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."
"Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad — we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress — at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned."
"My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life."
"As 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."
"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."
"The fire was furry as a bear."
"The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth."
"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us 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."
"Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness."
"People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess."
"I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?"
"I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance."
"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."
"I am resigned to the fact that people who don't know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writing poetry. It must be annoying to a man who wants to write to see this horrid old lady who can."
"Good taste is the worst vice ever invented."
"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself."
"I 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."
"I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish."
"It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees."
"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."
"My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence."
"A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits."