Vita Sackville-West Quotes

Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.

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!

but no one except a cad likes to reflect that he has been loved more than he has loved. It produces an uneasy though quite unreasonable sense of guilt. So Sebastian went himself to fetch his hat.

I wouldn’t commit murder for the sake of an allegory.

She found herself suddenly surrounded by a host of assumptions. It was assumed that she trembled for joy in his presence, languished in his absence, existed solely (but humbly) for the furtherance of his ambitions, and thought him the most remarkable man alive, as she herself was the most favoured of women, a belief in which everybody was fondly prepared to indulge her. Such was the unanimity of these assumptions that she was almost persuaded into believing them true.

You have my full permission.

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.

Clive with his tongue well-loosened, imagine my horror when he suddenly said, 'I wonder if I dare ask Vita a very indiscreet question?' and I, being innocent and off my guard, said yes he might, and he came out with 'Have you ever gone to bed with Virginia?' but I think my 'NEVER!' convinced him and everybody else of the truth. This will show you what the conversation was like!

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

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.

The only time I thought of Virginia as being eclipsed was when the sun himself shared her darkening and I saw her standing wraithlike on a Yorkshire moor while the shadow swept onwards towards totality

Suddenly the word instinct leaves me.

Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page.

Clive follows me all over the place. Have I been to bed with Virginia yet? If not, am I likely to do so in the near future? If not, will I please give it my attention? As it is high time Virginia fell in love.

Only it won’t be an earthquake - not in England, England isn’t seismic - it will be a gradual crumbling.