Vita Sackville-West Quotes

For one's hands are the parts of one's body that one suddenly sees with the maximum of detachment; they are suddenly far off; and one observes their marvellous articulations, and miraculous response to the transmission of instantaneous messages, as though they belonged to another person, or to another piece of machinery; one observes even the oval of their nails, the pores of their skin, the wrinkles of their phalanges and knuckles, their smoothness or rugosities, with an estimating and interested eye; they have been one's servants and yet one has not investigated their personality; a personality which, cheiromancy assures us is so much bound up with out own. One sees them also, as the case may be, loaded with rings or rough with work.

I cannot love your weeping poets...

Prune my ambition to the lowly prayer
That I may drive the furrow of my tale
Straight, through the lives and dignities I know.

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.

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.

My bed's at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the Princes and the Pea, - only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.

As each man knows the life that fits him best,
The shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone

Chances of meeting this person, doing that thing, accumulate. Life is as I’ve said since I was ten, awfully interesting – if anything, quicker, keener at forty-four than twenty-four – more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara – my new vision of death. ‘The one experience I shall never describe’ I said to Vita yesterday.

Yes, they were kind exceedingly; most mild Even in indignation, taking by the hand One that obeyed them mutely, as a child Submissive to a law he does not understand.

The greater cats with golden eyes Stare out between the bars. Deserts are there, and the different skies, And night with different stars. They prowl the aromatic hill, And mate as fiercely as they kill, To roam, to live, to drink their fill; But this beyond their wit know I: Man loves a little, and for long shall die.

This is how you must imagine your letters arriving, and me carrying them off to read in peace, and saying 'oh darling Virginia', and smiling to myself, and reading them all over again. Whereas mine just come with the postman.

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.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiences and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

"One cannot, I find, talk to a knitter. Conversation may seem to be going in that greased, easy way essential to all good conversation; starting hares too lavishly to follow them up; allowing pauses for rumination; bursts for sudden eagerness; digressions, returns, new departures, discoveries of rooted creeds or new ideas — sooner or later the challenge is bound to come: "Don't you agree?" or "What do you think?" "Yes?" says the knitter, startled but polite, "seventy-five, seventy-six — just a moment till I get to the end of my row — seventy-seven, seventy-eight — yes," she says, looking up brightly, "it's all right now. What were you saying?" But of course one has forgotten or no longer cares."

The fount of joy was bubbling in thine eyes,
Dancing was in thy feet,
And on thy lips a laugh that never dies,
Unutterably sweet.
Dance on! for ever young, for ever fair,
Lightfooted as a frightened bounding deer,
Thy wreath of vine-leaves twisted in thy hair,
Through all the changing seasons of the year...