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It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
Vita Sackville-West -
how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
Vita Sackville-West
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The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.
Vita Sackville-West -
One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
Vita Sackville-West -
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West
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I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.
Vita Sackville-West
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What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
Vita Sackville-West -
I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.
Vita Sackville-West -
Summer makes a silence after spring.
Vita Sackville-West -
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
Vita Sackville-West -
To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
Vita Sackville-West -
Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
Vita Sackville-West
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The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.
Vita Sackville-West -
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.
Vita Sackville-West -
A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
Vita Sackville-West -
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Vita Sackville-West