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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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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1893
Born: December 6
Died: 1978
Died: May 1
Linguist
Musicologist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Harrow
Silvia Warner
Writing
Written
Beloved
Demonstrated
Like
Friends
Letters
Apologize
Lasts
Pressure
Thomas
Last
Research
Apologizing
Actually
Soon
Letter
Illegible
Words
Blood
Badly
Notoriously
Hands
Shall
Plain
Subsequent
Two
Hand
Stood
Helen

More quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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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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Nine people out of ten (in Germany and England, perhaps ten people) would rather wait for their rights than fight for their rights.
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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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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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
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She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
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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There are not enough poems in praise of bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one's works.
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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Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.
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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cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Oh, I am all for singing. If I had had children I should have hounded them into choirs & choral societies, and if they weren't good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets.
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 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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noise is a pollution.
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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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