Vita Sackville-West Quotes
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
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
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
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.
Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.
It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.
It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.
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.
Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.
It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.
Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.
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?
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.
To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.
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.
All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
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.
Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.
Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
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.
