Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.

Edith Sitwell

Categorized in : Mean Winter Home

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Edith Sitwell

ignorance stupid patience

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

Edith Sitwell

music reading funny

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.

Edith Sitwell

home winter weather

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

Edith Sitwell

eels women people

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.

Edith Sitwell

rhythm dream reality

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

Edith Sitwell

vulgarity-is god reality

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

Edith Sitwell

being-yourself secret success

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

Edith Sitwell

artist children world

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

Edith Sitwell

irrational elements art

Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

Edith Sitwell

eye secret heart

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

Edith Sitwell

modesty time thinking

The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

Edith Sitwell

flattery opinion encouragement

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

Edith Sitwell

knitting writing believe

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

Edith Sitwell

poetry reality art

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

Edith Sitwell

poetry age law

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

Edith Sitwell

passion fire spring

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Edith Sitwell

poetry speak men

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Edith Sitwell

poetry ordinary children

There is no truth. Only points of view.

Edith Sitwell

point-of-view truth views

I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

Edith Sitwell

discipline taken fire