Vita Sackville-West Quotes
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All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
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My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
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Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
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The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.
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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another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.
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There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.
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I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
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There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding...
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It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose's voluminous quality; and when it finally drops from the vase, it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap, much as a rose will suddenly fall, making us look up from our book or conversation, to notice for one moment the death of what had still appeared to be a living beauty.
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Tools have their own integrity.
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Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.
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I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.
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It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
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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.
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all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.
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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.
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I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
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When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.
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I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
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See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.
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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.
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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.
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For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.
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Not seeing is half-believing.