Quote

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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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1893
Born: December 6
Died: 1978
Died: May 1
Linguist
Musicologist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Harrow
Silvia Warner
Hate
Overestimate
Energy
Hating
Cannot
Insects
Part
Stupidity
Power
Hatred
Much
Build
Good
Industry
Expend
Like
Stupid
Coral

More quotes by 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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General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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To think of losing is to lose already.
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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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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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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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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[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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The fatal flaw of gravity when you are down, everything falls down on you.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.
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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Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken.
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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no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.
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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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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... possessiveness cannot accept it cannot even strike a fair bargain it has to confer.
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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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