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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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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1893
Born: December 6
Died: 1978
Died: May 1
Linguist
Musicologist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Harrow
Silvia Warner
Things
Love
Scatter
Senses
Merely
Exist
Death
Two
Real

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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Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
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 need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.
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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She was heavier than he expected - women always are.
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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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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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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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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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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Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.
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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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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Love amazes, but it does not surprise.
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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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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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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... possessiveness cannot accept it cannot even strike a fair bargain it has to confer.
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