Home > Author > Sylvia Townsend Warner
61 " There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam. Yes, and the accumulations of human reason, she thought, the proofs we all assent to, the truths established beyond shadow of doubt, these are like the stale crusts of foam that lie along the river-bank and look solid enough, till a cloudburst further up the valley sends down a force of water that breaks them up and sweeps them away. "
― Sylvia Townsend Warner , The Corner That Held Them
62 " It was as easy for him to quit Bloomsbury for the Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard chair to a soft. Now after a little scrabbling and exploration he was curled up in the green lap and purring over the landscape. "
― Sylvia Townsend Warner , Lolly Willowes
63 " After all, every man will climb if he can, and not many of them continue so kind to old acquaintances. "
64 " Here lay she, still reverberating the pleasure long laid aside and never forgotten. "
65 " Dame Salome, with one of those flashes of worldly wisdom which at times emerge from very stupid well-meaning people, "
66 " What good? None, possibility. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. "
― Sylvia Townsend Warner , Summer Will Show
67 " The worst of it is, that as a revolutionary she is out of fashion. Before, she was an inspiration. But inspiration is not wanted now, it seems. One must be practical, one must be administrative, one must understand economics and systems. She pines. She said to me, that very evening, 'Our Moses was luckier than he knew, to die before he went into the promised land. "
― Sylvia Townsend Warner
68 " She felt that these clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows were suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity. Their jaws were like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces. "
69 " Squeezed uncomfortably into a corner the chaplain looked at him with a malevolence so habitual that it was almost indifference. "
70 " In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her loss. She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snow-storms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her. She tried to recover the sentiment of renunciation which she had worn like a veil. It was gone, and gone with it was her sense of the dignity of bereavement. "
71 " It is not hunger and nakedness that worst afflict the poor, for a very little thieving or a small alms can remedy that. No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor. "
72 " He had not been much of a poet, but poet enough for his love-sonnets and satires to weaken his lungs. "
― Sylvia Townsend Warner , Kingdoms of Elfin
73 " When I had exhausted our library I made several excursions—to Saint Andrew’s, to Oxford, to the German Universities—and read over the shoulders of mortal students. It was sometimes very trying not being able to turn the pages for myself, since I was a quicker reader than they; but invisibility had its drawbacks. "
74 " The fortune of his game had brought him fairies—but he had always known fairies were in the pack. "
75 " But the overruling disconcertingness was to find himself unconcerned. It was as if some mysterious oil had been introduced into the workings of his mind. If a thought irked him, he thought of something else. If a project miscarried, a flooding serenity swept him beyond it. He lived a tranquil truant, dissociated from himself as though by a slight agreeable fever. "
76 " There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam. "
77 " It was through him that the novices began to practise levitation. "
78 " His spirits, sharpened by disliking the bishop as an appetite is sharpened by pickles, took an upward turn. "
79 " his adventure had mastered him, and till it released him there was nothing for it but to submit. "
80 " Of all menaces to peace and quiet a visionary nun is the worst, "