Vita Sackville-West Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
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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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[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
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April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
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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!
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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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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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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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how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
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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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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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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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Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
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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.
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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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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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A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
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I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.
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To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.