Vita Sackville-West Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

Vita Sackville-West
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
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
You took me weak and unprepared.
I had not thought that you who shared
My days, my nights, my heart, my life,
Would slash me with a naked knife
And gently tell me not to bleed
But to accept your crazy creed.

Vita Sackville-West
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
Lucy laughed her most silvery laugh, the laugh that had made several men believe that she understood what they said.

Vita Sackville-West
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
For bees are captious folk
And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.

Vita Sackville-West
There was just time, in this reprieve before death, to indulge herself to the full.... She could lie back against death and examine life.

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

Vita Sackville-West
A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even one solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.

Vita Sackville-West
I came from nowhere, and shall be
Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally:
I am a lion, a stone, a tree,
And as the Polar star in me
Is fixed my constant heart on thee.
Ah, may I stay forever blind
With lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind.

Vita Sackville-West
It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don't really resent it.

Vita Sackville-West
Leopards on the gable-ends,
Leopards on the painted stair,
Stiff the blazoned shield they bear,
Or and gules, a bend of vair,
Leopards on the gable-ends,
Leopards everywhere.

Vita Sackville-West
The young men strained upon the crank
To wring the last reluctant inch.
They laughed together, fair and frank,
And threw their loins across the winch.

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

Vita Sackville-West
We know that the ultimate vex is the same for all:
The discrepancy
Between the vision and the reality.

Vita Sackville-West
I felt your love as a benediction
In tranquil branches above me spread,
Over my sometimes troubled head.

Vita Sackville-West
She walks among 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
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
All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn,
Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home
No longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn
Where she was wont to roam.

Vita Sackville-West
In February, if the days be clear,
The waking bee, still drowsy on the wing,
Will sense the opening of another year
And blunder out to seek another spring.

Vita Sackville-West
Oh bolting Time, rough pony of my days,
Halt by the hedgerow of my life to graze.

Vita Sackville-West
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?

Vita Sackville-West
Their strength's eternal in their sight,
They overtake the deer in flight,
And in their arrogance they smite;
But I am sage, if they are strong:
Man's love is transient as his death is long.

Vita Sackville-West
The country habit has me by the heart,
For he's bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun,
As each man knows the life that fits him best,
The shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone,
And after ranging on a tentative flight
Stoops like the merlin to the constant lure.

Vita Sackville-West
He instantly despised his guests for being still asleep, in a rush of that superiority which afflicts all those who are astir earlier than other people.

Vita Sackville-West
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They are for ever planting, and for ever digging up.

Vita Sackville-West
I look back as through a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities.

Vita Sackville-West
Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free,
Magnificent in giving; she was blind
To gain or loss, and, loving, loved but me, — but me!

Vita Sackville-West