Quote: Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: 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. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: Summer makes a silence after spring. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Flowers really do intoxicate me. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year. [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: 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]
Quote: I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves... [Vita Sackville-West]
Quote: 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]
Quote: For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ... [Vita Sackville-West]