Vita Sackville-West Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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
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
It is terrible to be twenty, Lady Slane. It is as bad as being faced with riding over the Grand National course. One knows one will almost certainly fall into the Brook of Competition, and break one's leg over the Hedge of Disappointment, and stumble over the Wire of Intrigue, and certainly come to grief over the Obstacle of Love.

Vita Sackville-West
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
Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

Vita Sackville-West
The dusk is heavy with the wine's warm load;
Here the long sense of classic measure cures
The spirit weary of its difficult pain;
Here the old Bacchic piety endures,
Here the sweet legends of the world remain.

Vita Sackville-West
All tools inevitably planned,
Stout friends, with pledge
Of service; with their crotchets too
That masters understand.

Vita Sackville-West
Life is so transitory, Lady Slane, that one must grab it by the tail as it flies past. No good in thinking of yesterday or to-morrow. Yesterday is gone, and to-morrow problematical.

Vita Sackville-West
Often on the painted stair,
As I passed abstractedly,
Velvet footsteps, two and three,
Padded gravely after me.
— There was nothing, nothing there,
Nothing there to see.

Vita Sackville-West
Who could so watch, and not forget the rack
Of wills worn thin and thought become too frail,
Nor roll the centuries back —
And feel the sinews of his soul grow hale,
And know himself for Rome's inheritor?

Vita Sackville-West
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
I sing the cycle of my country's year,
I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing,
Classic monotony, that modes and wars
Leave undisturbed, unbettered, for their best
Was born immediate, of expediency.

Vita Sackville-West
Sweet are the flutes of night-time, sweet the truce
Lies between day and day.

Vita Sackville-West
There's no beginning to the farmer's year,
Only recurrent patterns on a scroll
Unwinding.

Vita Sackville-West
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 to a great rooted tree. Surviving all vicissitudes, and rich with its manifold branches, every leaf holding its own significance.

Vita Sackville-West
The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.
They prowl the aromatic hill,
And mate as fiercely as they kill,
To roam, to live, to drink their fill;
But this beyond their wit know I:
Man loves a little, and for long shall die.

Vita Sackville-West
A man convinced against his will,
is of the same opinion still.

Vita Sackville-West
One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

Vita Sackville-West
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.

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

Vita Sackville-West
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
And what have I to give my friends in the last resort?
An awkwardness, a shyness, and a scrap,
No thing that's truly me, a bootless waste,
A waste of myself and them, for my life is mine
And theirs presumably theirs, and cannot touch.

Vita Sackville-West
Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated.

Vita Sackville-West
Yes, they were kind exceedingly; most mild
Even in indignation, taking by the hand
One that obeyed them mutely, as a child
Submissive to a law he does not understand.

Vita Sackville-West
Time was our banker once, and on our credit
Like an indulgent father let us draw.
Now he's turned sour, and our account does edit
And pounces on us with a usurer's claw.

Vita Sackville-West
How poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

Vita Sackville-West
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
Darling, I thought of nothing mean;
I thought of killing straight and clean.
You're safe; that's gone, that wild caprice,
But tell me once before I cease,
Which does your Church esteem the kinder role,
To kill the body or destroy the soul?

Vita Sackville-West
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
And so it ends,
We who were lovers may be friends.
I have some weeks in which to steel
My heart and teach myself to feel
Only a sober tenderness
Where once was passion's loveliness.

Vita Sackville-West