Vita Sackville-West Quotes

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; how the observation of last year seems childish, superficial; how this year — even this week — even with this new phrase — it seems to us that we have grown to a new maturity. It may be a fallacious persuasion, but at least it is stimulating, and so long as it persists, one does not stagnate. I look back as through a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities.

It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you.

It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — But 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.

If I had only loved your flesh And careless damned your soul to Hell, I might have laughed and loved afresh, And loved as lightly and as well, And little more to tell.

Who could so watch, and not forget the rack Of wills worn thin and thought become too frail, Nor roll the centuries back — And feel the sinews of his soul grow hale, And know himself for Rome's inheritor?

The dusk is heavy with the wine's warm load; Here the long sense of classic measure cures The spirit weary of its difficult pain; Here the old Bacchic piety endures, Here the sweet legends of the world remain.

A man and his loves make a man and his life.

A man and his land make a man and his creed.

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

Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated.

Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.

THAT I should live and look with open eyes I count as half my claim to Paradise. I have not crept beneath cathedral arches, But bathed in streams beneath the silver larches;

He carried a pencil always behind his ear, a pencil so broad and of so soft a lead that it could serve for nothing except making a mark across a plank of wood, but which Lady Slane never saw used for any other purpose than scratching his head.

I don't want to boast, but we are alive, aren't we? And our two lives, outside and inside, are rich lives - not little meagre repetitions of meagre cerebral habits.

And, – mark, – I do care so satisfactorily for the few people that matter to me. (For Virginia? Oh dear me YES, for Virginia.)