Vita Sackville-West quotes - page 3

Vita Sackville-West was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer, renowned for her literary works and influential gardens. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, her unconventional lifestyle and intense relationships inspired many. She became best known for her poetry, novels, and for designing the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. Here are 61 of her quotes:

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

Vita Sackville-West

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.

Vita Sackville-West

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

Vita Sackville-West

Summer makes a silence after spring.

Vita Sackville-West

I miss you even more than I could have believed and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Vita Sackville-West

I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves...

Vita Sackville-West

The more one gardens, the more one learns And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

Vita Sackville-West

Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn The boundaried love of country, being free Of winds, and alien lands, and distances, Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers, Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost Their privilege, and in the peddler's pack The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade, Bossy and singular, the heritage Of poetry and science, polished bright, Thin with the rubbing of too many hands; Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age, Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair, Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire, Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss. Why then in little meadows hedge about A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map So small a corner of so great a world?

Vita Sackville-West

I saw within the wheelwright's shed The big round cartwheels, blue and red; A plough with blunted share; A blue tin jug; a broken chair; And paint in trial patchwork square Slapping up against the wall; The lumber of the wheelwright's trade, And tools on benches neatly laid, The brace, the adze, the awl.

Vita Sackville-West