Vita Sackville-West Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

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
One never believes other people's experience, and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

Vita Sackville-West
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action — that should make up the sum of man's life.

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

Vita Sackville-West
I'll fill your heaven with many colored moons
And hang such variable tides upon them
As strew the astonished fish along the shores.

Vita Sackville-West
All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held
Reality down fluttering to a bench.

Vita Sackville-West
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
I cannot bear that you
Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.

Vita Sackville-West
That pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness.

Vita Sackville-West
The fingers of the Winter drip.
They weaken into water, as a heart
Melted by love.

Vita Sackville-West
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
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.

Vita Sackville-West
April the angel of the months, the young
Love of the year.

Vita Sackville-West
While many a lovely ship below sailed by
On unknown errand, kempt and leisurely;
And after each, oh, after each, my heart
Fled forth, as, watching from the Downs apart,
I shared with ships good joys and fortunes wide
That might befall their beauty and their pride…

Vita Sackville-West
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
I saw within the wheelwright's shed
The big round cartwheels, blue and red;
A plough with blunted share;
A blue tin jug; a broken chair;
And paint in trial patchwork square
Slapping up against the wall;
The lumber of the wheelwright's trade,
And tools on benches neatly laid,
The brace, the adze, the awl;

Vita Sackville-West
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
All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed,
The young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand,
And the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Is the voice of the lonely land.

Vita Sackville-West
If I had only loved your flesh
And careless damned your soul to Hell,
I might have laughed and loved afresh,
And loved as lightly and as well,
And little more to tell.

Vita Sackville-West
It was a real event in my life and my heart to be with you the other day. We do matter to each other, don't we? however much our ways may have diverged. I think we have got something indestructible between us, haven't we? … It has been a very strange relationship, ours; unhappy at times, happy at others; but unique in its way, and infinitely precious to me and (may I say?) to you.
What I like about it is that we always come together again however long the gaps in our meetings may have been. Time seems to make no difference.

Vita Sackville-West
The true solitary... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.

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

Vita Sackville-West
All the daily and the lovely things,
...
These little things, these nimble shy delights,
With the quick magic of significance
I'll not despise to startle into being.

Vita Sackville-West
A tomb of life, not death,
Life inward, true,
Where the world vanishes
And you are you.

Vita Sackville-West
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
Yours is the year that counts no season;
I can never be sure what age you are.

Vita Sackville-West