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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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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
Goddess
God
Modern
Pert
Reality
Descendant
Nothing
Dullness
Chic
Vulgarity
Descendants

More quotes by Edith Sitwell

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If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Edith Sitwell
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Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
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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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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The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
Edith Sitwell
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The living blind and seeing Dead together lie As if in love . . . There was no more hating then, And no more love Gone is the heart of Man.
Edith Sitwell
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All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.
Edith Sitwell
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The last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear,-- The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.
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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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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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
Edith Sitwell
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... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
Edith Sitwell
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A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
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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By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.
Edith Sitwell
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In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.
Edith Sitwell
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Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.
Edith Sitwell
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Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
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[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.
Edith Sitwell
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I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.
Edith Sitwell