Vita Sackville-West - Soul Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
One might reply that man himself was but a collection of atoms, even as a house was but a collection of bricks, yet man laid claim to a soul, to a spirit, to a power of recording and or perception, which had not more to do with his restless atoms than had the house with its stationary bricks.

Vita Sackville-West