SYLVIA ASHTON-WARNER

I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

I am inclined to think that eating is a private thing and should be done alone, like other bodily functions.

As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.

The truth is that I am enslaved... in one vast love affair with 70 children.

When I teach people, I marry them.

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.

A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.

... of the two kinds of order, the conscious and the unconscious order, only one is real. It's the order in the deep hidden places.

Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

What can be heavier than wealth than freedom?

You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.

Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.

Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.

How much of my true self I camouflage and choke in order to commend myself to him, denying the fullness of me. How often have I paraded sweetness and interest when I felt otherwise; pretended to take careful leave of him on many an occasion when I would rather have walked right out. How I've toned myself down, diluted myself to maintain his approval.

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.

To feel as well as hear what someone says requires whole attention.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

What a desire! ... to live in peace with that word: Myself.