Quotes from Sylvia Townsend Warner

When I had exhausted our library I made several excursions—to Saint Andrew's, to Oxford, to the German Universities—and read over the shoulders of mortal students. It was sometimes very trying not being able to turn the pages for myself, since I was a quicker reader than they; but invisibility had its drawbacks.

Therefore, at some point or other of Sir Glamie's pedigree an Elfin lady must have yielded to a mortal lover, and immortality, like the pox, has run in the family ever since.

Sir Maugre's erudition was so wide that whatever anyone said reminded him of something that had no bearing on it.

The fortune of his game had brought him fairies—but he had always known fairies were in the pack.

But the overruling disconcertingness was to find himself unconcerned. It was as if some mysterious oil had been introduced into the workings of his mind. If a thought irked him, he thought of something else. If a project miscarried, a flooding serenity swept him beyond it. He lived a tranquil truant, dissociated from himself as though by a slight agreeable fever.

There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam.

It was through him that the novices began to practise levitation.

His spirits, sharpened by disliking the bishop as an appetite is sharpened by pickles, took an upward turn.

his adventure had mastered him, and till it released him there was nothing for it but to submit.

Of all menaces to peace and quiet a visionary nun is the worst

But then, what is belief? A thought lodges in the mind, will not out, preserves its freshness and colour and flexibility like the corpse of a saint: is this belief, or is it heresy?

But the prioress continued to express pleasure in Dame Alice's common sense, candour, and lack of imagination, so Dame Alice continued to manifest common sense and lack of imagination.

Although she had chosen presents with such care for her relations, Laura was surprised when counter presents arrived from them. She had not thought of them as remembering her. (77)

But we cannot all be saints. Some of us have to be stewards.

Dame Alice was suffering from nothing more than an indigestion of self-importance.

The pother about the Visitation had no more relevance to the bishop's coming than the smell of hot women that was constantly in her nostrils had anything to do with the sun's journey overhead.

When a dog has slept in the same corner for so many years no one is likely to enquire into its pedigree.

For each one of us lives in his microcosm, the solidity of this world is a mere game of mirrors, there can be no absolute existence for what is apprehended differently by all.

Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations--accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring feet on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen.

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

One doesn't become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that - to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to by others.

She was heavier than he expected - women always are.

One doesn't become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It's to escape all that – to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.

Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.