Vita Sackville-West Quotes

Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.

It is a sad moment when the first phlox appears. It is the amber light indicating the end of the great burst of early summer and suggesting that we must now start looking forward to autumn. Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty; but I just cannot bear to see another summer go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means.

My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.

There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.

Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.

I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.

however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.

a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality.

There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.

how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.

Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.

April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.

I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.

that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!

The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.

It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

Summer makes a silence after spring.

See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.

Not seeing is half-believing.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.

How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.

The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.

I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Tools have their own integrity.

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

The true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.

Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.