Vita Sackville-West Quotes

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.

Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.

Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.

The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.

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.

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung ...

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.

Tools have their own integrity ...

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

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.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go ...

I don't know what to say to you expect that it tore my heart out of my body saying goodbye to you.

Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.

She wondered which wounds went deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?

There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...

II worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.

For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ...

The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.

I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves ...

Not seeing is half-believing.

Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.

Summer makes a silence after spring.

A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

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.

I cannot love your weeping poets ...

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.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.

There are no signposts in the sea.

Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW]

It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.

How poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

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.

Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

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.

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

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.

My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.

Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.

Homesick we are, and always, for another
And different world.

It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.