We owned a garden on a hill, We planted rose and daffodil, Flowers that English poets sing, And hoped for glory in the Spring. We planted yellow holl… - Vita Sackville-West

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.

write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross; that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written.

I saw within the wheelwright’s shed The big round cartwheels, blue and red; A plough with blunted share; A blue tin jug; a broken chair; And paint in trial patchwork square Slapping up against the wall; The lumber of the wheelwright’s trade, And tools on benches neatly laid, The brace, the adze, the awl;