Quotes from Sylvia Ashton-Warner

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.

I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.

When I teach people, I marry them.

When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.

The truth is that I am enslaved... in one vast love affair with 70 children.

Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.

Truth has beauty, power and necessity.

You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough, to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.

So often I have said in the past, when a war is over, the statesmen should not go into conference one with another, but should turn their attention to the infant rooms, since it is from there that comes peace or war.

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

I never forgive attacks on my work.

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.

We already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development.