Quotes from Sylvia Townsend Warner

That's why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It's not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - "blight the genial bed.

During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat's yawn, "I think I will go to my grave now," and had left the room.

She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again, and dressed her in the old uniform.

Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.

Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he.

There is an amusing sense of superiority in seeing and remaining unseen.

At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace. She did not recall the places which she had visited in holiday-time, these reproached her like opportunities neglected. But while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood.

My blood ran with this ink...

She could never feel love for him. Love was what she felt for birds—a free gift, unrequired, unrequited, invulnerable.

London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.

Sitting here, and thus, she had attained to a state which she could never have desired, not even conceived. And being so unforeseen, so alien to her character and upbringing, her felicity had an absolute perfection; no comparison between the desired and the actual could tear holes in it, no ambition whisper, But this is not quite what you wanted, is it?

Still reading, Miss St John? You read a lot, don't you? - It saves me from conversation.

Was it for pleasure that you followed them Putting off your slippers at the door To dance barefoot and blood-foot in the snow? No. What then? What glamoured you? No glamour at all; Only that I remembered I was young And had to put myself into a song. How could time bear witness that I was tall, Silken, and made for love, if I did not so? I do not know. - Earl Cassilis's Lady

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

all her thoughts slid together again like a pack of hounds that have picked up the scent.

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.

Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.

There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else.

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.