Dame Edith Sitwell

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.

— Dame 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.

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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.

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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.

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell