Vita Sackville-West Quotes

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

I have discovered my true function in life: I am a snob.

Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free,
Magnificent in giving; she was blind
To gain or loss, and, loving, loved but me, — but me!

A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

I hope you miss me, though I could scarcely (even in the cause of vanity) wish you to miss me as much as I miss you, for that hurts too much, but what I do hope is that I’ve left some sort of a little blank which won’t be filled till I come back. I bear you a grudge for spoiling me for everybody’s else companionship, it is too bad.

Their strength's eternal in their sight, They overtake the deer in flight, And in their arrogance they smite; But I am sage, if they are strong: Man's love is transient as his death is long.

There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.

With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.

She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen in its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead. So, she thought, could she at last put circles on her life. Slowly she crossed that day, as one crosses a field by a little path through the grasses, with the sorrel and the buttercups waving on either side; she crossed it again slowly, from breakfast to bed-time, and each hour, as one hand of the clock passed over the other, regained for her its separate character: this was the hour, she thought, when I first came downstairs that day, swinging my hat by its ribbons; this was the hour when he persuaded me into the garden, and sat with me on the seat beside the lake, and told me it was not true that with one blow of its wing a swan could break the leg of a man.

I always preferre the works of God to the works of man. The works of God, I always felt, were given freely to anyone who could appreciate them, whether millionair or pauper, wheras the works of man were reserved for the millionaires. Unless, indeed, the works of man were sufficient to the man who made them; then, it wouldn't matter what millionaire bought them in after years.

I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again, – even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.

Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.

Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ‘let us at least have good manners.

What I should really like to do would be to take you to some absurdly romantic place, — vain dream, alas! What with Leonard and the Press — Besides, by romantic I mean Persia or China, not Tintagel or Kergarnec. Oh what fun it would be, and Virginia's eyes would grow rounder and rounder, and presently it would all flow like water from a Sparklets siphon, turned into beautiful bubbles.