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It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

Edith Sitwell

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Edith Sitwell
Age: 77 †
Born: 1887
Born: September 7
Died: 1964
Died: December 9
Biographer
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Scarborough
North Yorkshire
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
Edith Louisa Sitwell
Dame Edith Sitwell
Miss Edith
Good
Respectable
Nowadays
Hardly
Ethics
Integrity

More quotes by Edith Sitwell

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Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.
Edith Sitwell
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Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
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The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.
Edith Sitwell
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My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
Edith Sitwell
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The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
Edith Sitwell
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All great art contains an element of the irrational.
Edith Sitwell
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What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.
Edith Sitwell
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I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell
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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
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I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.
Edith Sitwell
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I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.
Edith Sitwell
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[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.
Edith Sitwell
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I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
Edith Sitwell
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White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna - all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.
Edith Sitwell
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I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
Edith Sitwell
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Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell
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Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
Edith Sitwell
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... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
Edith Sitwell
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it is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.
Edith Sitwell
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I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
Edith Sitwell