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When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.

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
Moving
Letters
Decay
Postman
Even
Fail
Circle
Obituary
Mind
Fast
Moves
Helpers
Comfort
Circles
Column
Failing
Stands
Comforts
Longer
Senses
Flee
Grasshopper
Quite
Brings
Columns
Narrower
Family
Burden
Royal
Grasshoppers

More quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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There are not enough poems in praise of bed.
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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One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.
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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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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[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.
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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She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones.
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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Young people are careless of their virginity one day they may have it and the next not.
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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One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.
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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when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Sneezes ... always sound much louder to the sneezer than to the hearers. It is an acoustical peculiarity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now!
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.
Sylvia Townsend Warner