Vita Sackville-West Quotes - Page 2

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

Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.

A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.

Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.

April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.

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

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.

It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.

Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.

I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.

My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.

See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.

When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.

Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West

There are no signposts in the sea.

There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.

Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.