Vita Sackville-West Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Vita Sackville-West quote about:
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“I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”
-- 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 -
“Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer. Minute by minute they lengthen out. It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change. It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, as you watch it day by day, until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise we realize that we can stay out of doors in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour.”
-- 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, into a great rooted tree”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.”
-- 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 -
“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. 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 -
“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? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“Summer makes a silence after spring.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.”
-- 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 -
“It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose's voluminous quality; and when it finally drops from the vase, it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap, much as a rose will suddenly fall, making us look up from our book or conversation, to notice for one moment the death of what had still appeared to be a living beauty.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.”
-- Vita Sackville-West -
“For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ...”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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
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