Wit & Attitude Quote by Edith Sitwell

Patience is Sitwell's opening concession, but it comes sharpened: she can tolerate ignorance as a human condition, not as an identity people polish and parade. The line is less a complaint about low intelligence than a cultural indictment of anti-intellectual swagger, the social performance where not knowing becomes a badge and learning is recast as pretension. Sitwell draws a moral distinction between limitation and willful posture. Stupidity, in her framing, can be accidental; pride is chosen.

The quote also shows a poet's ear for pivot and sting. "But not" is the trapdoor. It turns patience from a virtue into a boundary, and makes the target clear: not the slow, the uneducated, or the mistaken, but the smug. That matters in a Britain where class codes often treated refinement as suspect and where modernist art (including Sitwell's own work) was mocked as nonsense. She spent years as a public punching bag for being too strange, too mannered, too "clever", so she learned to recognize when mockery isn't critique but resentment dressed up as common sense.

Subtext: she's defending seriousness itself. The line refuses the comforting idea that authenticity is always noble; sometimes "being real" is just refusing growth. Her patience is charitable toward people who haven't had access, time, or confidence. Her impatience is reserved for the loud certainty that shuts down curiosity. It's a clean, ruthless ethics for the public sphere: errors can be corrected; proud ignorance recruits.