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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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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
Might
Shapes
Schopenhauer
Giving
Sight
Translators
World
Meaning
Pitch
Gives
Deprived
Sound
Described
Reality
Principal
Dream
Melody
Light
Rhythm

More quotes by Edith Sitwell

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The poet is the complete lover of mankind.
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The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
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The light would show (if it could harden) Eternities of kitchen garden
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I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.
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If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
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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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I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.
Edith Sitwell
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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
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Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.
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I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
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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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The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of a moment of their other lives - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
Edith Sitwell
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A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
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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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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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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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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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I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
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