Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer. A successful and prolific novelist, poet, and journalist during her lifetime—she was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems—today she is chiefly remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst she created with her diplomat husband, Sir Harold Nicolson. She is also remembered as the inspiration for...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 March 1892
There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...
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.
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.
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.
Tools have their own integrity ...
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.
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.
Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.
Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.
For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ...