Top 85 Vita Sackville Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
Vita Sackville-West
#5. 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
#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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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.
Vita Sackville-West
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ...
Vita Sackville-West
#18. [On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
Vita Sackville-West
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.
Vita Sackville-West
#24. Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.
Vita Sackville-West
#25. 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
#26. Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.
Vita Sackville-West
#27. The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
Vita Sackville-West
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...
Vita Sackville-West
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
Vita Sackville-West
#39. 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
#40. She walks in the loveliness she made,
Between the apple-blossom and the water
She walks among the patterned pied brocade,
Each flower her son, and every tree her daughter.
Vita Sackville-West
#41. 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.
Vita Sackville-West
#43. 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
#44. Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.
Vita Sackville-West
#45. 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.
Vita Sackville-West
#46. Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.
Vita Sackville-West
#47. She wondered which wounds went deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?
Vita Sackville-West
#48. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.
Vita Sackville-West
#49. Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW]
Vita Sackville-West
#50. Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.
Vita Sackville-West
#51. 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
#53. I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
Vita Sackville-West
#55. All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
Vita Sackville-West
#56. See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go ...
Vita Sackville-West
#57. 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
#58. Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.
Vita Sackville-West
#61. I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
Vita Sackville-West
#62. I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.
Vita Sackville-West
#63. I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves ...
Vita Sackville-West
#68. 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
#69. My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,
Vita Sackville-West
#70. 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.
Vita Sackville-West
#71. 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
#72. To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
Vita Sackville-West
#73. Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
Vita Sackville-West
#74. Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
Vita Sackville-West
#76. 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
#77. Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
Vita Sackville-West
#79. 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.
Vita Sackville-West
#80. Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
Vita Sackville-West
#81. The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Vita Sackville-West
#83. Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...
Vita Sackville-West
#84. 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
#85. 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
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