83 Quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

They had an assured income, nothing could disturb their calm.

As for her own share in the matter, she felt no shame at all. It had pleased Satan to come to her aid. Considering carefully, she did not see who else would have done so. Custom, public opinion, law, church, and state - all would have shaken their massive heads against her plea, and sent her back to bondage.

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.

There is an amusing sense of superiority in seeing and remaining unseen.

During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room.

She was heavier than he expected - women always are.

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.