Edith Sitwell
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"Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell" Order of the British Empire/DBE was a British poet and critic and the eldest of The Sitwells/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.

Sitwell published poetry continuously from 1913, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was also praised for its solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship.

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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

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.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

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

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

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

I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.

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.

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