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There is a moral, of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1893
Born: December 6
Died: 1978
Died: May 1
Linguist
Musicologist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Harrow
Silvia Warner
Pursued
Courses
Course
Moral
Better
Like
Morals

More quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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All encounters with children are touched with social embarrassment.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all the perils and choleras of acquaintance implicit in them but in London they seem as charming as rabbits.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash and then for a very long time you are old.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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The baby romped on my lap like a short stout salmon.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Is it the realization that people recently psychoanalyzed tend to be dreadful bores which makes the U.S.A. army reject them for the draft?
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Reason is a poor hand at prophecies.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.
Sylvia Townsend Warner