83 Quotes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Happiness is an immunity.

So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything “earthy and warm.” Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs.

Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness – these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.

Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.

Laura took them into her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed to her even more beautiful than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination.

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.

The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.

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