Vita Sackville-West
22 quotes
Biography
"Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this."
"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."
"Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom."
"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."
"A man and his tools make a man and his trade."
"A man and his land make a man and his creed."
"A man and his loves make a man and his life."
"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."
"It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you."
"I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all."
"Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep."
"All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held Reality down fluttering to a bench."
"Her appearance was indeed remarkable — strange almost beyond the reach of adjectives … She resembled a puissant blend of both sexes — Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled into one."
"Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation."
"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt."
"I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong."
"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong."
"There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree"
"What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful."
"Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,When I have no engagements written on my block,When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,When no one comes to take me away from myselfAnd turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,Being so contrived that it takes too long a timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone."
"So prodigal was I of youth Forgetting I was young I worshipped dead men for their strength Forgetting I was strong."
"Ambition old as mankind the immemorial weakness of the strong."