Vita Sackville-West Quotes
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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.
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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.
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April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
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[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
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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.
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Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.
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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.
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Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
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The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
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Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
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Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.
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One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
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A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
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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.
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But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.