83 Quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sir Maugre’s erudition was so wide that whatever anyone said reminded him of something that had no bearing on it.

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.

I knew a time when Europe feasted well:bodies were munched in thousands, vintage bloodso blithely flowed that even the dull mudgrew greedy, and ate men; ...Long revel, but at last to loathing turned,and through after-dinner speeches yawnedthose who still waked to hear them. No one claps.Come, Time, 'tis time to bear away the scraps!- Opus 7

He used his intellect as he used his legs: to carry him somewhere else. He studied astrology, astronomy, botany, chemistry, numerology, fortification, divination, organ building, metallurgy, medicine, perspective, the kabbala, toxicology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. He kept his interest in anatomy and did a dissection whenever he could get hold of a body. He learned Arabic, Catalan, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian, Romany, and demotic Greek.

One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.

That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - “blight the genial bed.

Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment.

In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her loss.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.

The fortune of his game had brought him fairies—but he had always known fairies were in the pack.