Quotes from Edith Sitwell

I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm 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.

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.

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

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

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

I am dying but otherwise I am quite well.

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

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Poetry is the deification of reality.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

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!

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

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.

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.