Stevie Smith Quotes
Truth is far and flat, and fancy is fiery; and truth is cold, and people feel the cold, and they may wrap themselves against it in fancies that are fiery, but they should not call them facts; and, generally, poets do not; they are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, but they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith, edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith, was an English poet and novelist. She was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets and won the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry. A play Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
