Quotes By Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner

“During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room.”

“Four thousand miles away, across a continent, across an ocean, was an island. And there, secure in the timelessness of all things irretrievably lost, was happiness—like a bird singing or a flower growing. He had possessed it, he had misused it—for to do anything with happiness but to receive it as the ear receives the song of a bird or the nostril the scent of a flower is to misuse it; he had left it. But because he had left it of his own will it had given him—a parting gift—this touchstone to carry forever in his heart, wherewith to try and infallibly dismiss any solace, whether by chance or plotted by the treachery of his desires, that might come to him and say, I too am happiness.”