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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.
Vita Sackville-West -
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
Vita Sackville-West
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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.
Vita Sackville-West -
There are no signposts in the sea.
Vita Sackville-West -
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West
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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.
Vita Sackville-West -
For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.
Vita Sackville-West -
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!
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West
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Not seeing is half-believing.
Vita Sackville-West -
Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.
Vita Sackville-West -
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
Vita Sackville-West -
I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.
Vita Sackville-West
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I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
Vita Sackville-West -
how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
Vita Sackville-West -
Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.
Vita Sackville-West -
It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
Vita Sackville-West