Quote

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

More quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else.
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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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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She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
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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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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I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.
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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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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... possessiveness cannot accept it cannot even strike a fair bargain it has to confer.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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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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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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We are also rather concerned about our moorhen who went mad while we were in Italy and began to build a nest in a tree. ... she walks about in the tree, looking as uneasy yet persevering as a district visitor in a brothel.
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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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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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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I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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There are not enough poems in praise of bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.
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