The Corner That Held Them Quotes

“And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam. Yes, and the accumulations of human reason, she thought, the proofs we all assent to, the truths established beyond shadow of doubt, these are like the stale crusts of foam that lie along the river-bank and look solid enough, till a cloudburst further up the valley sends down a force of water that breaks them up and sweeps them away.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“It is not hunger and nakedness that worst afflict the poor, for a very little thieving or a small alms can remedy that. No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor. Entering”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“She looked, and it was as if new eyes had been put into her head... Half the world was hung with blue mantle criss-crossed with an infinity of delicate creases, and the whole outspread mantle stirred as though a separate life were beneath it. Coming to her sense she knew that this must be the sea. But nothing that she had seen in pictures or read in books or heard in sermons was true to what she saw. Their sea was dark, turbulent, vexed with storms, a metaphor of sin, and exiled from heaven. This was calm. It lay as blissfully asleep as though it still lay in the trance of its first creation. Its colour was an unflawed virtue; it lay there and knew nothing but the God who had made it.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“(for it is disillusioning to discover that compassion, stretched out too long, materialises into nothing more than a feat of endurance).”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“After all, every man will climb if he can, and not many of them continue so kind to old acquaintances.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“She looked; and it was as if new eyes had been put into her head.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“It is not hunger and nakedness that worst afflict the poor, for a very little thieving or a small alms can remedy that. No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“For each one of us lives in his microcosm, the solidity of this world is a mere game of mirrors, there can be no absolute existence for what is apprehended differently by all.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“His spirits, sharpened by disliking the bishop as an appetite is sharpened by pickles, took an upward turn.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“When a dog has slept in the same corner for so many years no one is likely to enquire into its pedigree.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“The pother about the Visitation had no more relevance to the bishop’s coming than the smell of hot women that was constantly in her nostrils had anything to do with the sun’s journey overhead.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Dame Alice was suffering from nothing more than an indigestion of self-importance.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“But we cannot all be saints. Some of us have to be stewards.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“But the prioress continued to express pleasure in Dame Alice’s common sense, candour, and lack of imagination, so Dame Alice continued to manifest common sense and lack of imagination.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“his adventure had mastered him, and till it released him there was nothing for it but to submit.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Dame Helen agreed that cleverness was not everything. Many saints were simple enough. The prioress remarked that it was not till christian times that simplicity became a virtue; the good characters of the Old Testament were ingenious as well as virtuous. ‘That was because they were Jews,’ said Dame Beatrix.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“But then, what is belief? A thought lodges in the mind, will not out, preserves its freshness and colour and flexibility like the corpse of a saint: is this belief, or is it heresy?”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Of all menaces to peace and quiet a visionary nun is the worst,”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“It was through him that the novices began to practise levitation.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Squeezed uncomfortably into a corner the chaplain looked at him with a malevolence so habitual that it was almost indifference.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Dame Salome, with one of those flashes of worldly wisdom which at times emerge from very stupid well-meaning people,”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“Here lay she, still reverberating the pleasure long laid aside and never forgotten.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“No Jews now,’ she chirruped, ‘to waylay poor little lads and hang them up in cellars. It was a good day for England when they were packed off.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“He had no wish to obtrude himself on bishops.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them