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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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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
Think
Thinking
Permissible
Unavoidable
Greed
Indeed
Poetry
May

More quotes by 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'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.
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 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'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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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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I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
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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All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.
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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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 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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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
Edith Sitwell
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I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.
Edith Sitwell
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Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
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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Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.
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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If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
Edith Sitwell