To Vita Sackville West Quotes

#1. Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

Virginia Woolf

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Vita Sackville-West

#5. 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

#6. You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can only tell you that I am shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation ...

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#9. In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.

Jane Goldman

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. How I adore you and want you. You can't know how much ... I love belonging to you
I glory in it, that you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, and made me yours, so that away from you I am nothing but a useless puppet, an empty husk.

Violet Trefusis

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

Vita Sackville-West

#16. 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

#17. A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.

Vita Sackville-West

#18. 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

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#21. 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

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#24. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#26. And I'll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads - the won't stir by day, only by dark on the river.

Virginia Woolf

#27. All the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

Vita Sackville-West

#28. 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

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

#31. Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.

Vita Sackville-West

#32. 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

#33. Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.

Vita Sackville-West

#34. Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.

Gwendoline Christie

#35. I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

Vita Sackville-West