Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (1887–1964) was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. Like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Edith reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents, and lived for much of her life with her governess. She never married, but became passionately attached to the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London’s poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.
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Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Madness
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty. But I am too busy thinking about myself.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Modesty, Humility
Poetry is the deification of reality.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Words
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
Topics: Originality
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
I’m not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Men
I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Boredom
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
Topics: Winter
Still falls the rain—dark as the world of man, black as our loss—blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Rain, Water
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Profanity, Vulgarity, Swearing
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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
Topics: Authority
I am dying, but otherwise quite well.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Mindsets, Positive Attitudes, Optimism
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Trials, Justice, Babies
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Style, Taste
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Silence
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
Topics: Flattery
It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Virtue
I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
—Edith Sitwell
Topics: Patience, Stupidity, Foolishness
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