Vita Sackville-West - Life Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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