Quotes from Sylvia Townsend Warner

He had no wish to obtrude himself on bishops.

No Jews now,' she chirruped, 'to waylay poor little lads and hang them up in cellars. It was a good day for England when they were packed off.

If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.

They had an assured income, nothing could disturb their calm.

she had watched the wrong fields.... The weight of all her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she trembled, understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another moment she was released. It was all gone, it could never be again, and never had been. Tears of thankfulness ran down her face. With every breath she drew, the scent of the cowslips flowed in and absolved her.

To-day I wish that I were a tree, And not myself, Confronting spring with a neat little row of poems Like cups and saucers on a shelf. ... But as I am only a woman And not a tree, With piteous human care I have made this poem, And set it now on the shelf with the rest to be. - Wish in Spring

Members of the ruling class are unwilling to admit themselves mistaken.

And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.

I knew a time when Europe feasted well: bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood so blithely flowed that even the dull mud grew greedy, and ate men; ... Long revel, but at last to loathing turned, and through after-dinner speeches yawned those who still waked to hear them. No one claps. Come, Time, 'tis time to bear away the scraps! - Opus 7

I think you will come to Balzac yet. When one has disproved all one's theories, outgrown all of one's standards, discarded all one's criterions, and left off minding about one's appearance, one comes to Balzac. And there he is, waiting outside his canvas tent—with such a circus going on inside.

Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves ... She compared herself to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and nights the increasing pull of the earth below. That explanation was very poetical and suitable. But it did not explain what she felt. She was not wildly anxious either to die or to live; why, then, should she be rent by this anxiety?

Brewer the gardener, stamping out the ashes of his bonfire, saw her pass to and fro, a slender figure moving sedately between the unmoving boughs. He alone of all the household had taken his master's death without exclamation. Death coming to the old was a harmless thought to him, but looking at Laura he sighed deeply, as though he had planted her and now saw her dashed and broken by bad weather.

God, an enormous darkness, hung looped over half her sky, an ever-present menace, a cloud waiting to break.

She looked; and it was as if new eyes had been put into her head.

It was as easy for him to quit Bloomsbury for the Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard chair to a soft. Now after a little scrabbling and exploration he was curled up in the green lap and purring over the landscape.

After all, every man will climb if he can, and not many of them continue so kind to old acquaintances.

Here lay she, still reverberating the pleasure long laid aside and never forgotten.

Dame Salome, with one of those flashes of worldly wisdom which at times emerge from very stupid well-meaning people

What good? None, possibility. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca.

The worst of it is, that as a revolutionary she is out of fashion. Before, she was an inspiration. But inspiration is not wanted now, it seems. One must be practical, one must be administrative, one must understand economics and systems. She pines. She said to me, that very evening, 'Our Moses was luckier than he knew, to die before he went into the promised land.

She felt that these clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows were suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity. Their jaws were like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces.

Squeezed uncomfortably into a corner the chaplain looked at him with a malevolence so habitual that it was almost indifference.

In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her loss. She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snow-storms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her. She tried to recover the sentiment of renunciation which she had worn like a veil. It was gone, and gone with it was her sense of the dignity of bereavement.

He had not been much of a poet, but poet enough for his love-sonnets and satires to weaken his lungs.