Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise. - Violet Keppel Trefusis

In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent, you can escape, vanish with a snicker.

You are my lover and I am your mistress and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination.

Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before. - to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918