Top 90 Vita Sackville-West Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Vita Sackville-West

52. “Lady Roehampton was not a young woman; but she was still, though not without taking a certain amount of trouble, beautiful. This question of the middle-aged woman’s beauty and desirability has never sufficiently been exploited by novelists.”

— Vita Sackville-West

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

— Vita Sackville-West

54. “The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.”

— Vita Sackville-West

55. “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.”

— Vita Sackville-West

56. “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.”

— Vita Sackville-West

57. “I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.”

— Vita Sackville-West

58. “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.”

— Vita Sackville-West

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

— Vita Sackville-West

60. “Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality.”

— Vita Sackville-West

61. “One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.”

— Vita Sackville-West

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

— Vita Sackville-West

63. “Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn’t care deeply.”

— Vita Sackville-West

64. “Virginia wasn’t all cool intellect by any means. She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affections for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.”

— Vita Sackville-West

65. “All emotion now was a twilight thing.”

— Vita Sackville-West

66. “Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.”

— Vita Sackville-West

67. “Someday I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?”

— Vita Sackville-West

68. “Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ’let us at least have good manners.”

— Vita Sackville-West

69. “Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page.”

— Vita Sackville-West

70. “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.”

— Vita Sackville-West

71. “I wouldn’t commit murder for the sake of an allegory.”

— Vita Sackville-West

72. “We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.”

— Vita Sackville-West

73. “There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.”

— Vita Sackville-West

74. “All love is a weakness, if it comes to that, in so far as it destroys some part of our independence.”

— Vita Sackville-West

75. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...”

— Vita Sackville-West

76. “According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told. Being a woman, I daresay that even you took a certain pleasure in the process.”

— Vita Sackville-West

77. “You see it is so easy for you sitting in Tavistock Square to look inward; but I find it very difficult to look inward when I am also looking at the coast of Sinai; and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.”

— Vita Sackville-West

78. “Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever.”

— Vita Sackville-West

79. “The only time I thought of Virginia as being eclipsed was when the sun himself shared her darkening and I saw her standing wraithlike on a Yorkshire moor while the shadow swept onwards towards totality.”

— Vita Sackville-West

80. “I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again, – even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.”

— Vita Sackville-West

81. “He was a foolish cynic who said that great love occurred only two or three times in a century. 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. Surviving all vicissitudes, and rich with its manifold branches, every leaf holding its own significance.”

— Vita Sackville-West

82. “Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.”

— Vita Sackville-West

83. “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 defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”

— Vita Sackville-West

84. “I find life altogether intoxicating, – its pain no less than its pleasure, – in which Virginia plays no mean part.”

— Vita Sackville-West

85. “Chances of meeting this person, doing that thing, accumulate. Life is as I’ve said since I was ten, awfully interesting – if anything, quicker, keener at forty-four than twenty-four – more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara – my new vision of death. ‘The one experience I shall never describe’ I said to Vita yesterday.”

— Vita Sackville-West

86. “I am absolutely devoted to her, but not in love. So there.”

— Vita Sackville-West

87. “Only it won’t be an earthquake – not in England, England isn’t seismic – it will be a gradual crumbling.”

— Vita Sackville-West

88. “I have discovered my true function in life: I am a snob.”

— Vita Sackville-West

89. “Her body had, in fact, become her companion, a constant resource and preoccupation; 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. Yet it was, rather than otherwise, an agreeable and interesting tyranny.”

— Vita Sackville-West

90. “Suddenly the word instinct leaves me.”

— Vita Sackville-West

91. “Clive with his tongue well-loosened, imagine my horror when he suddenly said, ‘I wonder if I dare ask Vita a very indiscreet question?’ and I, being innocent and off my guard, said yes he might, and he came out with ‘Have you ever gone to bed with Virginia?’ but I think my ‘NEVER!’ convinced him and everybody else of the truth. This will show you what the conversation was like!”

— Vita Sackville-West

92. “My bed’s at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the Princes and the Pea, – only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.”

— Vita Sackville-West