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... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

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
Excepting
Endures
Ugliness
Passes
Skin
Skins
Endure
Beauty

More quotes by 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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What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.
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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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 wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?
Edith Sitwell
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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.
Edith Sitwell
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All great art contains an element of the irrational.
Edith Sitwell
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It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.
Edith Sitwell
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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
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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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
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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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 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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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 light would show (if it could harden) Eternities of kitchen garden
Edith Sitwell
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It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.
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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Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell
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I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
Edith Sitwell