Top 60 Sylvia Townsend Warner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Happiness is an immunity.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

2. “Anticipation of pleasure is a pleasure in itself.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

3. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

4. “Inflation is the senility of democracies.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

5. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

6. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

7. “One cannot revoke a true happiness.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

8. “There are not enough poems in praise of bed...”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

9. “Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

11. “I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it’s their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

12. “When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

13. “Of all damnable offenses preaching prudence to the young is the most damnable.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

15. “One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

16. “To think of losing is to lose already.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

17. “Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

18. “Happy is the day whose history is not written down.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

19. “Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

20. “I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

21. “I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

22. “And another day is tucked under my wing.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

23. “It is,” answered Laura with almost violent agreement. “If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

24. “When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

25. “Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

27. “Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

28. “She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again, and dressed her in the old uniform.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

29. “Children driven good are apt to be driven mad.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

30. “At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace. She did not recall the places which she had visited in holiday-time, these reproached her like opportunities neglected. But while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

31. “The baby romped on my lap like a short stout salmon.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

32. “All encounters with children are touched with social embarrassment.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

33. “I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

34. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

35. “In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one’s works.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

36. “Belligerents always abolish war after a war.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

37. “General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

38. “Love is the only real patriation, and without one’s dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

39. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

40. “She could never feel love for him. Love was what she felt for birds – a free gift, unrequired, unrequited, invulnerable.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

41. “To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world. No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

42. “But what are wishes, compared with longings?”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

43. “How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

44. “Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

45. “She was heavier than he expected – women always are.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

46. “Those who spend their strength in field and factory would rather hear that their emancipation is bound to come than that it is something to be hazardously purchased by struggle and sacrifice.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

47. “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.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

49. “I seem to use this word ‘kind’ very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

50. “Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner