Vita Sackville-West Quotes
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To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
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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.
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Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
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Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.
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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.
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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.
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I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
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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.
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All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
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[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
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The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer. Minute by minute they lengthen out. It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change. It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, as you watch it day by day, until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise we realize that we can stay out of doors in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour.
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See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.
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Flowers really do intoxicate me.
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Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
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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.
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I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
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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.
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The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
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A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
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My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
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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.
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a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality.
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I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
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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.
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I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
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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.
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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.
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Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
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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?
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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.
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