Vita Sackville-West Quotes - Page 3

Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.

Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.

It is a sad moment when the first phlox appears. It is the amber light indicating the end of the great burst of early summer and suggesting that we must now start looking forward to autumn. Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty; but I just cannot bear to see another summer go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means.

I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.

The writer 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.

The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.

The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.

Summer makes a silence after spring.

Tools have their own integrity.

The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

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.

For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.

all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

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?

how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!