Vita Sackville-West Quotations

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

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?

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

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 ...

There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...

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

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.

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