Vita Sackville-West
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.Collection: Travel
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.Collection: Good
I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.Collection: Strength
Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.
Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
There are no signposts in the sea.
Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.
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.
Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.Collection: Education
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.Collection: Funny
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 treeCollection: Love
A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.Collection: Flower
I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.Collection: Love
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 myself And 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 time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.Collection: Block
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.Collection: Success
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.Collection: Gardening
Flowers really do intoxicate me.Collection: Flower
I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.Collection: Love
Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.Collection: Successful
I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. 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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Life
I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.Collection: Art
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.Collection: Color
Not seeing is half-believing.Collection: Inspirational
It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.Collection: Sweet
The true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.Collection: True Life
Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Strong
A man and his tools make a man and his trade.Collection: Men
Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.Collection: Sleep
April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.Collection: Angel
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.Collection: Strong
There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.Collection: Cat
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.Collection: Country
Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.Collection: Freedom
How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.Collection: Travel
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.Collection: Beauty
For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: January
I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.Collection: Attitude
It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.Collection: Stupid
Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.Collection: Flower
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.Collection: Inspirational
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.Collection: Garden
See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.Collection: Blow
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.Collection: Women