Sylvia Townsend Warner

One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Happiness is an immunity.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it.…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

“It is,” answered Laura with almost violent agreement. “If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

I have an idea that conscience impedes quite as many merits as faults, is a sort of alloy, a nickel which may…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Inflation is the senility of democracies.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

about ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut,…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

“Sitting here, and thus, she had attained to a state which she could never have desired, not even conceived. And being so…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

I cannot love people in the country, I discover, because there is always this danger that they may be acquaintances, with all…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

And another day is tucked under my wing.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

“Sept.17 (1780). When we call loudly thro' the speaking-trumpet to Timothy ( the tortoise), he does not seem to regard the noise.…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner