Quotes from Sylvia Townsend Warner

To think of losing is to lose already.

The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace.

Happiness is an immunity.

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.

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

Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it is something to be hazardously purchased by struggle and sacrifice.

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.

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

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.

Love amazes, but it does not surprise.

no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.

Belligerents always abolish war after a war.

when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything "earthy and warm." Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs.

Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.

It may all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust." -Warner, Lolly Willowes

This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green spur that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armor. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.

Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. "It is," answered Laura with almost violent agreement. "If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.

Laura took them into her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed to her even more beautiful than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination.

He used his intellect as he used his legs: to carry him somewhere else. He studied astrology, astronomy, botany, chemistry, numerology, fortification, divination, organ building, metallurgy, medicine, perspective, the kabbala, toxicology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. He kept his interest in anatomy and did a dissection whenever he could get hold of a body. He learned Arabic, Catalan, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian, Romany, and demotic Greek.

Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment.

As for her own share in the matter, she felt no shame at all. It had pleased Satan to come to her aid. Considering carefully, she did not see who else would have done so. Custom, public opinion, law, church, and state - all would have shaken their massive heads against her plea, and sent her back to bondage.

Sept.17 (1780). When we call loudly thro' the speaking-trumpet to Timothy ( the tortoise), he does not seem to regard the noise. Sept.18. Timothy eats heartily. Oct.3. No ring-ouzels seen this autumn yet. Timothy very dull.